The first word of this story is Anti-clericalism, a force that has shaped history through the violent suppression of religious authority. This opposition to religious power is not merely a modern political stance but a historical current that has erupted in bloodshed across centuries and continents. In the 18th century, the Catholic Church held a dominant role in pre-revolutionary France, controlling vast wealth and influencing the monarchy, yet this power became the target of a revolution that would see 30,000 priests exiled and hundreds more killed. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, passed on the 12th of July 1790, demanded that all clerics swear allegiance to the French government, a move that caused all but seven of the 160 bishops to refuse the oath. This refusal triggered a persecution that turned churches into temples of reason and replaced the Christian calendar with one reckoning from the date of the Revolution. The Reign of Terror saw the state suppress the church, abolish the Catholic monarchy, and nationalize church property, creating a level of violence that Europe would not see again until the rise of state atheism in communist Eastern Europe. The conflict was so intense that local people often resisted dechristianization, forcing members of the clergy who had resigned to conduct Mass again, leading to the War in the Vendée from 1793 to 1796. When Pope Pius VI took sides against the revolution in the First Coalition, French troops imprisoned him in 1797, and he died after six weeks of captivity, marking a pivotal moment in the struggle between church and state.
The Culture Struggle
In the 19th century, the battle against religious authority shifted from the French Revolution to the political heart of Europe, where Otto von Bismarck launched the Kulturkampf, or culture struggle, in Prussia from 1871 to 1878. This campaign was designed to reduce the political and social influence of the Catholic Church, which 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. Bismarck accelerated the Kulturkampf, which did not extend to other German states such as Bavaria where Catholics were in the majority, by enacting a series of discriminatory laws that made Catholics feel 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. The conflict reached its height when 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, and a third of the monasteries and convents were closed. The state arrested priests and bishops who resisted, 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 conflict ended about 1880 with a new pope Leo XIII willing to negotiate with Bismarck, who then broke with the Liberals over religion and over their opposition to tariffs. In Austria, Emperor Joseph II had previously opposed what he called contemplative religious institutions, dissolving more than 500 of 1,188 monasteries in Austro-Slav lands and taking 60 million florins by the state to create 1,700 new parishes and welfare institutions. His policy, known as Josephinism, treated marriage as a civil contract rather than a religious institution and took the education of priests from the Church, establishing six state-run General Seminaries. Catholic historians have claimed that there was an alliance between Joseph and anti-clerical Freemasons, who were a powerful ally of the Enlightenment party in Germany and Austria during the 18th century.
The struggle against religious authority in Latin America was rooted in the colonial heritage where the Aztec, Maya, and Inca cultures made substantial use of religious leaders to ideologically support governing authority and power. This pre-existing role of religion as an ideological adjunct to the state made it relatively easy for the Spanish conquistadors to replace native religious structures with those of a Catholicism that was closely linked to the Spanish throne. Beginning in the 1820s, a succession of liberal regimes came to power in Latin America, and some members of these liberal regimes sought to imitate the Spain of the 1830s and revolutionary France of a half-century earlier in expropriating the wealth of the Catholic Church. The Mexican Constitution of 1824 had required the Republic to prohibit the exercise of any religion other than the Catholic faith, but starting in 1855, President Benito Juárez issued decrees nationalizing church property, separating church and state, and suppressing religious orders. The conflict escalated into the Cristero War, an armed peasant rebellion supported by the Catholic Church, against the Mexican government following the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The new Mexican Constitution of 1917 contained further anti-clerical provisions, including Article 3 which called for secular education in the schools and prohibited the Church from engaging in primary education, and Article 5 which outlawed monastic orders. The suppression of the Church included the closing of many churches and the killing of priests, with the persecution being most severe in Tabasco under the atheist governor Tomás Garrido Canabal. Between 1926 and 1934, over 3,000 priests were exiled or assassinated, and where 4,500 priests served the people before the rebellion, in 1934 there were only 334 priests licensed by the government to serve fifteen million people. The war had a profound effect on the Church, and the Cristero rebels committed their share of violence, which continued even after formal hostilities had ended, with almost 300 rural teachers murdered between 1935 and 1939. In Ecuador, tensions came to a head in 1875 when the conservative President Gabriel García Moreno, after being elected to his third term, was allegedly assassinated by anti-clerical Freemasons. In Colombia, La Violencia refers to an era of civil conflict between supporters of the Colombian Liberal Party and the Colombian Conservative Party, which took place roughly from 1948 to 1958 and claimed the lives of an estimated 180,000 Colombians, with militants attacking churches, convents, and monasteries, killing priests and looking for arms.
The Global Secular Wave
The fight against religious authority extended beyond Europe and the Americas to the Islamic world and the Philippines, where the dynamics of power and belief shifted dramatically. In the Philippines, anti-clericalism was rooted in the anti-clericalism of 19th-century Spain, with José Rizal, a member of the ilustrado class and one of the most prominent of the Philippines' national heroes, holding anti-clerical views until his eventual recantation before his day of execution. The Katipunan, the secret society that spearheaded the Philippine Revolution after Rizal's execution, was also noted for its anti-clericalism. In modern times, Rodrigo Duterte, the country's previous president, adopted a combative verbal stance toward the Church hierarchy and its staunchest supporters, blaming and cursing Pope Francis for the traffic congestion in the national capital in 2015, and predicting the Church's temporal demise in 25 years in 2019. In Iran, the 1979 Islamic Revolution gave even more systematic power to clerics under the doctrine of rule by Islamic jurists, or velayat-e faqih, where clerics serve as heads of state and judges. However, by the late 1990s and 2000s, anti-clericalism was reported to be significant in the Islamic Republic of Iran, with demonstrators using slogans such as The clerics live like kings while we live in poverty. In Indonesia, during the fall of Suharto in 1998, a witch hunt in Banyuwangi against alleged sorcerers spiraled into widespread riots and violence, and Islamic clerics were also targeted and killed, with Nahdlatul Ulama members murdered by rioters. In Cuba, under the rule of atheist Fidel Castro, the government succeeded in reducing the Church's ability to work by deporting the archbishop and 150 Spanish priests, by discriminating against Catholics in public life and education, and by refusing to accept them as members of the Communist Party. The subsequent flight of 300,000 people from the island also helped to diminish the Church there. In Venezuela, the government of Antonio Guzmán Blanco, in office from 1870 to 1877, from 1879 to 1884, and from 1886 to 1887, virtually crushed the institutional life of the church, even attempting to legalize the marriage of priests, and these anti-clerical policies remained in force for decades afterward.
The Politics of Exclusion
The political landscape of the 20th century was deeply shaped by anti-clerical movements that sought to redefine the relationship between the state and the church, often through the exclusion of religious influence from public life. In France, the Third Republic saw a further phase of anti-clericalism, with the Jules Ferry laws of 1881 and 1882 establishing free education and excluding clerics and religious education from schools. The Law on the separation of the Churches and the State of 1905, enacted under the government of Radical-Socialist Émile Combes, prevented religious congregations from sponsoring and conducting schools. In the Affaire des Fiches from 1904 to 1905, 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 Portugal, the fall of the Monarchy in the Republican revolution of 1910 led to another wave of anti-clerical activity, where most church property was put under State control, and the church was not allowed to inherit property. The revolution and the republic took a hostile approach to the issue of church and state separation, driving bishops from their dioceses, seizing the property of clerics, banning the wearing of the cassock, and closing all minor seminaries. A law of the 22nd of February 1918, permitted only two seminaries in the country, but they had not been given their property back. In Canada, the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s broke the hold of the church on provincial politics, with the Quebec Liberal Party embracing formerly taboo social democratic ideas, and the state intervening in fields once dominated by the church, especially health and education, which were taken over by the provincial government. In Argentina, the original Constitution of 1853 provided that all Argentine presidents must be Catholic, but by 1954, the country saw extensive destruction of churches, denunciations of clergy, and confiscation of Catholic schools as Perón attempted to extend state control over national institutions. The renewed rupture in church-state relations was completed when Perón was excommunicated, and in 1955, he was overthrown by a military general who was a leading member of the Catholic Nationalist movement.
The Shadow of Freemasonry
The influence of secret societies on anti-clerical movements has been a subject of intense historical debate, with the Catholic Church historically viewing Freemasonry as a principal source of anti-Clericalism. According to the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, Freemasonry was viewed as being a principal source of anti-Clericalism, especially in historically Catholic countries. From the official documents of French Masonry contained principally in the official Bulletin and Compte-rendu of the Grand Orient, it has been proved that all the anti-clerical measures passed in the French Parliament were decreed beforehand in the Masonic lodges and executed under the direction of the Grand Orient, whose avowed aim is to control everything and everybody in France. The Grand Orient's documents state that no one should move in France outside of them, and that despite the failure of the official transactions, there are a great many German and not a few American Masons, who evidently favor at least the chief anti-clerical aims of the Grand Orient party. In the Affaire des Fiches, the War Minister General Louis André used the French Masonic Grand Orient's card index on public officials to determine promotions, detailing which were Catholic and who attended Mass, with a view to preventing the promotion of Catholics. The Catholic Church has long maintained that Freemasonry was a powerful ally of the Enlightenment party in Germany and Austria during the 18th century, and that the anti-clerical measures passed in the French Parliament were decreed beforehand in the Masonic lodges. The influence of Freemasonry extended to the political struggles in Latin America, where anti-clerical Freemasons were alleged to have assassinated President Gabriel García Moreno of Ecuador in 1875. The connection between Freemasonry and anti-clericalism has been a persistent theme in the history of the struggle between church and state, with the Catholic Church viewing it as a principal source of anti-Clericalism and the Freemasons viewing it as a means to control everything and everybody in France and beyond.
The Modern Secular State
In the 21st century, the legacy of anti-clericalism continues to shape political debates and social movements across the globe, with the issue of subsidized private schools remaining a sensitive issue in French politics and the Italian Communist and Italian Socialist parties embodying anti-clericalism in opposition to the Vatican-backed party Christian Democracy. In Italy, 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 favor of the Church, such as the eight per thousand law, the teaching of religion in schools, and other privileges. In Poland, Your Movement is an anti-clerical party founded in 2011 by politician Janusz Palikot, which won 10% of the national vote at the 2011 Polish parliamentary election. In modern Polish media, anti-clericalism is promoted by magazine NIE and Roman Kotliński's newspaper. In the United States, despite the lack of Catholic establishments, Philip Jenkins notes in his 2003 book The New Anti-Catholicism that the U.S. has always had anti-clericals, with famous 1876 editorial cartoons by Thomas Nast portraying bishops as crocodiles who are attacking public schools, with the connivance of Irish Catholic politicians. The Catholic Church has canonized several martyrs of the Spanish Civil War and beatified hundreds more, and the Church has claimed a right to express its opinions and a moral duty in guiding Christians on ethical questions. In the Philippines, the inclusion of Rizal's novels Noli me tangere and El filibusterismo in the country's formal-education curricula was strongly opposed by the domestic Catholic Church hierarchy. In Latin America, about 71% of the population acknowledge allegiance to the Catholic Church, and about 43% of the world's Catholics inhabit the Latin countries of South, Central, and North America, yet the slowness to embrace religious freedom in Latin America is related to its colonial heritage and to its post-colonial history. The struggle between church and state continues to evolve, with the Catholic Church facing increasing secularization and the rise of new political movements that challenge its influence in public life.