The Decline of Ecclesiastical Hellenization and the Rise of Democracy

This is a particular work focusing on an aspect of the Catholic Church in Europe, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, concerning the rise of democracy during the so-called Modernist Crisis. I view the Modernist phenomenon as an historical lens through which to understand the politics, often characterized by artful and dishonest practices, between the Church and the State, and through which to evaluate their polity as a form or constitution of political organization of the Church and the State. Chapter One addresses Modernism as an internal ecclesiastical phenomenon, that is, a movement within the Roman Church but not of the Roman Church. Given that internal movement, in Chapter Two I discuss the resistance of the Church’s aristocratic hierarchy to a developing democracy. In Chapter Three I focus on the contemporary period and discuss a philosophical and theological issue related to Modernism, that was ultimately derived from it, but was unknown to the Modernists themselves. That is, the phenomenon of modern French laïcité which has appeared as a development of the the Catholic religious experience following upon the evolution of the separation of the between Church and State