Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe ed. by Christopher Clark, Wolfram Kaiser (review)

NEWMAN STUDIES JOURNAL 80 Enterprising editors do a real service to understanding when they bring scholars together from different national and language areas to compare notes on an internationally occurring historical phenomenon, in this case the late nineteenthcentury “culture wars” that typically pitted Liberals against Catholics. Following essays by the editors outlining the “New Catholicism” (Clark, Cambridge) and the European anticlericalisms of the time (Kaiser, Portsmouth), ten specialists, some well known, some younger historians, describe the hotter phases of this kind of conflict from the perspective of the different countries. All are solid historiography, some enlivened by local case studies that give a feel for the tensions aroused at the grassroots. For anyone interested in nineteenth-century Catholicism in Europe,this is informative and interesting; for scholars of the subject, it is must reading. It contains an up-to-date annotated bibliography of select works. One author, Manuel Borutta of Berlin, writing on the Prussian case (1870–1878) that provides the paradigm of Kulturkampf, adopts an intriguing suggestion. In this view, the academic disciplines of history and sociology, so heavily influenced by the German university tradition, have carried on in objectified form the passions and prejudices of the nineteenth-century liberals. For if Catholicism was innately inhibited in (self-) critical thinking, that alone would explain Catholics’ obvious cultural and intellectual inferiority and societal untrustworthiness. At any rate, the contributions in this book seem to indicate that those passions and prejudices are finally dying out in the academy, so that a wider range of explanatory reasons come into view in examining the heated controversies of that time. For the contributor on the United Kingdom, J. P. Parry (Cambridge), the principal contenders in what might pass for an English culture war around the time of the First Vatican Council are the Liberal Party under Gladstone and the nonconformist Protestants. The latter see themselves as better suited than the Established Church to guarantee the survival of traditional English Protestant culture. Not that the Catholic specter was absent from the picture; it was there in the Irish, in the papal infallibility proclaimed at the Council, in the converts from the Church of England and last not least in the Romanizing tendencies detected within the Establishment itself. But Catholics themselves were not under particular assault at this time,certainly not from the Liberal Party,nor were they girding for battle like so many ultramontane Catholics on the continent. Kaiser (p. 69) tells us that Gladstone’s Expostulation of 1874, The Vatican Decrees in Their Bearing on Civil Allegiance, was influenced by Ignaz Döllinger, of all people, hardly a “secular” liberal and only “anticlerical” in a derived Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Ed. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pages viii + 368. Cloth, $80.00, ISBN 0-521-80997-5; eBook format, $64.00, ISBN 9-780521-809979. CULTURE WARS: SECULAR-CATHOLIC CONFLICT IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE CHRISTOPHER CLARK AND WOLFRAM KAISER, EDS. 81 sense. Newman’s answering Letter to the Duke of Norfolk would be part of an innerCatholic argument with Cardinal Manning—a sideshow for the British public. After all, Gladstone’s electoral defeat in 1874 came not so much because he alienated his base among Irish Catholics or Protestant nonconformists, but because the latter had created such a stir over disestablishment and loosening the Church of England’s grip on education that voters preferred the Conservatives. Newman, with his view of the Church of England serving as a breakwater (remora) against the tides of infidelity, would have understood. One does wonder to what extent Newman might have contributed to the relatively pacific English situation in the otherwise strife-torn 1870s: Liberals, Protestant, or secular, on one side and mainly Catholics on the other. Had the Apologia proVita Sua of 1864/65 so cut the ground out from under cultured liberals, those inclined to see priestcraft as the enemy,that they could not mount a meaningful attack? More broadly, the historical context this book offers may help one to understand why Newman chose to sum up his life’s work as directed against “liberalism” in some of its many shades of meaning. This was the label...