Is the defining feature of modernity the destruction of the Church?

Few of us realize how much of the Church has been destroyed—not just lost or abandoned, but deliberately destroyed—in the last five centuries.

In the year 1500 there were thousands of monasteries peppering the landscape of Europe, in every country, from Scotland to Sicily, from Portugal to Russia. Monasteries actually owned a significant proportion of the land in some places (most of which they rented to tenants) and were some of the most important economic bodies in Europe. Imagine a place where the normal large-scale economic unit is not a corporation, but a community of monks, and you have an idea of it. Well, the fact that we have to imagine it (and that it is difficult to imagine) is evidence in itself of how completely that world has vanished. But it did not gradually fall apart, nor did it die of natural causes.

I study medieval manuscripts. In my studies, I’ve been aware for a long time that the largest manuscript collections are mostly owned by governments and housed in large public libraries: the British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France are the two most prominent ones. (A significant exception is the Vatican Library.) It only lately occurred to me to ask how the manuscripts got into these government libraries. After all, most of them were created by monks, owned by churches, and housed in monastery libraries. Yet a vast number of them are now in the hands of these government institutions. How came they there?

The short answer is that these governments attacked the monasteries, drove out the monks, and looted their possessions.

In England, this was the first step of the Reformation. Henry VIII dissolved, by Act of Parliament, all the major monasteries of England and confiscated their property. This amounted to perhaps a quarter or a third of the land of England—most of which, within a generation, had passed out of the Crown and into the hands of the aristocracy. In one stroke, the government of England maimed the Church forever.

In France it was the Revolution. Cluny, for centuries the largest monastery in the world, was wrecked and looted. The Revolutionary government, like the English two centuries earlier, dissolved many of the monasteries and confiscated their property. France, at one time the heart of Christendom, likewise maimed the Church forever.

The religious orders are the muscles of the Church. Without them, the Church is like a body with bones, blood vessels, and skin, but no muscle. It lives, but it can accomplish nothing that requires exertion. It has no strength and no mass. It cannot defend itself.

And then I began to see that the whole progress of the modern world in the last five centuries has been united in one thing: the destruction of the religious orders. At every important stage in modern civilization they have been wrecked in one way or another. Let’s just run through the examples that come easily to mind:

1) The Reformation. The Reformers attack the Church in the name of Christianity. In England Henry VIII destroys the religious orders; in other places they are broken up more piecemeal. France and the other former Roman provinces (except England) hold out.

2) The French Revolution. The Revolution attacks the Church in the name of democracy. The Revolutionaries sack many of the monasteries and do their best to destroy the Church. Napoleon takes the Pope captive and confiscates much of the papal library.

3) The unification of Germany. Bismarck attacks the Church in the name of German nationalism in the kulturkampf.

4) The unification of Italy. The Italian government attacks the Church in the name of Italian nationalism and seizes the papal states. The Pope considers himself a prisoner in the Vatican until 1929.

5) The First and Second World Wars. These of course were more a case of Europe attacking itself than specifically the Church, and everyone shared in the devastation. But mark that this was one more stage when monasteries were broken and their property was destroyed or passed into government hands.

6) The Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks attack the Church in the name of communism.

7) Likewise the Spanish Civil War.

8) The Sixties and after. The left attacks the Church in the name of relativism. The remaining religious orders in the West begin to evaporate like smoke.

            Looking at this sketch of history, I am tempted to say that the defining feature of modernity is the destruction of the Church. It seems that every important stage in the last five centuries of Western history has been accompanied by the further destruction of the Church. First the Church as an economic body—then as a political body—finally as a spiritual body, which is the attack we are still enduring. Moreover the various modern ‘ideologies’ are incompatible with each other and generally hate each other. Protestant Christianity, liberal democracy, scientific rationalism, communism, relativism, nihilism—what do these have in common except that they all have made it their mission to attack the Church?

            From this perspective, any attempt from within the Church to ‘modernize’ appears as the Church choosing to contribute to its own destruction. Look at what has happened since the Second Vatican Council, the great council about ‘the Church in the Modern World.’ The religious orders have been corrupted or been reduced to shreds. Simply put, Catholics have joined in the attack on the Church as an economic and political body, and in many cases as a spiritual body. The Church has become modern; that is, the Church has become suicidal.