Anti-clericalism

• 1. Introduction

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  Anti-clericalism is opposition to religious authority, particularly in social and political life. It is a thread that runs through centuries of history, from the courts of revolutionary France to the mountains of Mexico, from the palaces of Vienna to the cities of Spain. How did disagreements between church and state produce some of the most violent confrontations in recorded history? Why did governments that once relied on the clergy to legitimize their rule eventually turn against them with such force? And what happens when the very institution meant to guide a people's faith becomes, in the eyes of its critics, an obstacle to their freedom? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Revolution and Dechristianization

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  On the 12th of July 1790, the French National Constituent Assembly passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, demanding that every cleric swear allegiance to the revolutionary government. All but seven of the 160 bishops refused. About half of the parish priests refused as well. Those who would not swear were called nonjuring priests, and they faced exile or imprisonment. Women walking to Mass were beaten in the streets.

  What followed in the next few years was unlike anything Europe had seen. During the Reign of Terror, the revolutionary authorities suppressed the church entirely, nationalized church property, and exiled 30,000 priests. Hundreds more were killed. Many churches were converted into what the authorities called temples of reason, where new civic ceremonies were held in place of religious services.

  In October 1793, the Christian calendar itself was replaced. A new calendar reckoned time from the date of the Revolution, and the government scheduled Festivals of Liberty, Reason and the Supreme Being in place of religious observances. Two new state-sponsored religions took shape: the deistic Cult of the Supreme Being, and France's first officially atheistic institution, the Cult of Reason. All churches not devoted to these movements were closed.

  Not everyone submitted. In the Vendee region, counter-revolutionaries took up arms from 1793 to 1796 to resist dechristianization. Local people often forced clergy who had renounced their vows to conduct Mass again. Eventually Maximilien Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety turned against the dechristianization campaign themselves, attempting to install a religion stripped of Catholic doctrine.

  When Pope Pius VI sided against the revolution in the First Coalition of 1792-1797, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Italy in 1796. French troops imprisoned the Pope in 1797, and he died after six weeks of captivity. Napoleon later reversed course, re-establishing the Catholic Church in France with the Concordat of 1801. Yet many anti-clerical policies persisted; when Napoleonic armies entered new territories, monasteries were frequently sacked and church property seized by the state.

• 3. Kulturkampf and State Power

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  Otto von Bismarck launched what became known as the Kulturkampf, or culture struggle, against the Catholic Church in Prussia between 1871 and 1878. In 1871, Catholics made up 36.5% of the German Empire, including large populations in the west and south, and the vast majority of Poles. Bismarck aimed to build support among liberals and Protestants, who constituted 62% of the population, by curbing the church's political reach.

  Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans and other religious orders were expelled from Prussia, the culmination of what one scholar described as twenty years of anti-Jesuit and antimonastic feeling. Priests and bishops who resisted were arrested or removed. At the height of the campaign, 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, and 1,800 parish priests were imprisoned or exiled. Thousands of laypeople were also imprisoned for supporting the clergy.

  The Kulturkampf produced the opposite of its intended effect. Rather than weakening Catholic influence, it galvanized Catholics into an organized political force within the Centre party and revived Polish resistance to Prussian authority. The campaign wound down around 1880 after Pope Leo XIII proved willing to negotiate with Bismarck. Bismarck subsequently broke with the Liberals over both religion and their opposition to tariffs, and won Centre party backing for most of his conservative agenda, particularly his campaign against socialism.

  Emperor Joseph II of Austria had enacted a parallel program decades earlier, between 1765 and 1790. He targeted what he called contemplative religious institutions, which he saw as contributing nothing to the community. Joseph dissolved more than 500 of the 1,188 monasteries in Austro-Slav lands, and a hundred more in Hungary, taking 60 million florins for the state. The money funded the creation of 1,700 new parishes and welfare institutions. Joseph also established six state-run General Seminaries to take over the education of priests, and in 1783 a Marriage Patent redefined marriage as a civil contract rather than a religious institution.

• 4. Spain's Red Terror

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  The first anti-clerical violence tied to political conflict in 19th-century Spain came during the Trienio Liberal, the Spanish Civil War of 1820-1823, when members of the liberal movement killed 20 clergymen in Catalonia in retaliation for the Church's support of the absolutist king Ferdinand VII.

  A more systematic campaign came in 1836 when Prime Minister Juan Alvarez Mendizabal, following the First Carlist War, promulgated the Ecclesiastical Confiscations of Mendizabal, abolishing the major Spanish convents and monasteries.

  The most violent phase came during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. Catholics largely supported Francisco Franco and the Nationalist forces. Anti-clerical assaults during the conflict, described by the Nationalists as the Red Terror, killed 6,832 members of the clergy. Among those killed were 13 bishops, drawn from dioceses including Sigüenza, Lleida, Cuenca, Barbastro, Segorbe, Jaen, Ciudad Real, Almeria, Guadix, Barcelona, Teruel and the auxiliary diocese of Tarragona. The dead also included 4,172 diocesan priests, 2,364 monks and friars among them 259 Clarentians, 226 Franciscans, 204 Piarists, 176 Brothers of Mary, 165 Christian Brothers, 155 Augustinians, 132 Dominicans and 114 Jesuits. At least 283 nuns were killed as well.

  Accounts from the period describe priests being forced to dig their own graves before being buried alive, and Catholics forced to swallow rosary beads or thrown down mine shafts. The Catholic Church later canonized several martyrs from the war and beatified hundreds more.

  Before joining Franco's coalition, the Falangist movement had itself shown anti-clerical tendencies, viewing the Church as an elite institution that blocked Falangist ambitions. Once the alliance with monarchists and other nationalist groups was formed, the Falangists shifted to support the Church, and they had not participated in any of the massacres.

• 5. Mexico's Cristero War

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  Mexico's anti-clerical tradition stretched back to 1824, when the original Mexican Constitution required the Republic to prohibit any religion other than Catholicism. Starting in 1855, President Benito Juarez issued decrees nationalizing church property, separating church from state, and suppressing religious orders.

  The Mexican Constitution of 1917, produced after the Revolution of 1910, went further. Article 3 called for secular education and banned the Church from primary schooling. Article 5 outlawed monastic orders. Article 24 prohibited public worship outside church buildings. Article 27 restricted religious organizations from holding property. Article 130 stripped clergy members of basic political rights.

  When President Plutarco Elias Calles enacted what became known as Calles Law, resistance turned armed. The Cristero Rebellion of 1927-1929 was a peasant uprising backed by the Catholic Church against the Mexican government. The suppression of the Church during this period included closing many churches and killing priests. The most severe persecution came in the state of Tabasco, under the atheist governor Tomas Garrido Canabal.

  In 1928, President Alvaro Obregon was assassinated by Jose de Leon Toral, a Catholic radical, gravely damaging the peace process. US diplomat Dwight Morrow was brought in to mediate the conflict.

  Between 1926 and 1934, at least 40 priests were killed. Over the same period, more than 3,000 priests were exiled or assassinated. Where 4,500 priests had served the population before the rebellion, by 1934 only 334 priests were licensed by the government to serve fifteen million people. Ten states were left without any priests at all.

  Violence persisted even after formal hostilities ended. Between 1935 and 1939, approximately 300 rural schoolteachers were murdered by former Cristero rebels in some of the most brutal episodes of the aftermath.

• 6. Latin America and Colonial Roots

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  About 71% of Latin America's population acknowledges allegiance to the Catholic Church, and about 43% of the world's Catholics live in the countries of South, Central and North America. That concentration of faith made the region a persistent battleground between clerical authority and secular reform.

  The Aztec, Maya and Inca cultures all used religious leaders to ideologically support governing power. That pre-existing relationship between religion and the state made it relatively straightforward for Spanish conquistadors to replace native religious structures with a Catholicism closely tied to the Spanish throne.

  Beginning in the 1820s, a succession of liberal regimes came to power across the region. Some sought to follow the examples set by Spain in the 1830s and revolutionary France a half century earlier, expropriating church wealth and restricting or prohibiting religious orders. Confiscation of church property and changes to religious liberties generally accompanied broader secularizing reforms, typically expanding the rights of non-Catholics while licensing or suppressing religious orders.

  In Colombia, anti-clerical legislation was enacted and enforced across more than three decades from 1849 to 1884. During La Violencia, the civil conflict between Liberal and Conservative supporters that ran roughly from 1948 to 1958, militants attacked churches, convents and monasteries and killed priests. A conspiracy theory held that the clergy were stockpiling weapons, yet not a single usable weapon was found in any of the raids.

  In Venezuela, Antonio Guzman Blanco governed in three periods between 1870 and 1887 and virtually dismantled the institutional life of the church, even attempting to legalize the marriage of priests. Those anti-clerical policies remained in force for decades after his time in office.

  In Ecuador, the conservative President Gabriel Garcia Moreno was allegedly assassinated in 1875 by anti-clerical Freemasons after being elected to his third term in office.

• 7. Iran and the Islamic World

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  Anti-clericalism is not a uniquely Christian phenomenon. In Sunni Islam, which has no formal clergy, believers are expected to consult experts in Islamic jurisprudence on legal questions, a practice known as taqlid, or imitation. Shia Islam has historically been more systematized in this regard. By the 19th century, Shia scholars taught that believers should turn to the highest-ranking clerics, known as sources of taqlid, or marja' at-taqlid.

  During the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, the Shia scholar Akhund Khurasani and his colleagues argued that in the absence of the Imam al-Mahdi, democracy was the best available form of governance. Khurasani declared that opposition to constitutional democracy was hostility to the twelfth Imam himself. He defined democracy as a system that enforces limitations on the head of state and government employees, ensuring they work within the boundaries that the laws and religion of a nation establish. He also argued that modern secular laws complement traditional religion, and that both religious rulings and laws outside the scope of religion together resist state despotism.

  In 1925, Reza Khan proclaimed himself Shah and launched a Westernization program. Islamic schools were secularized, women were forbidden from wearing the hijab, sharia law was abolished, and men and women were brought together in educational and religious settings. His son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi continued these policies. The clergy's resentment contributed directly to the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79 and the Shah's flight from the country.

  When Ayatollah Khomeini took power, the Shah's reforms were largely reversed. Clerics became heads of state and judges, gained authority to veto legislation they considered un-Islamic, and controlled who could run for president or parliament. Yet by the late 1990s and 2000s, anti-clericalism had become significant inside the Islamic Republic itself. Observers noted that Iranians tended to mock their mullahs. Demonstrators carried slogans such as "The clerics live like kings while we live in poverty." Stories circulated about leading clerics holding Swiss bank accounts.

  During the fall of Suharto in Indonesia in 1998, violence in Banyuwangi that began as a witch hunt against alleged sorcerers expanded to target Islamic clerics, and members of the Nahdlatul Ulama were murdered by rioters.

• 8. Canada and the Quiet Revolution

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  In French Canada after the Conquest, the Catholic Church occupied an unusual position: it was the sole major national institution not under direct British colonial control. French Canadian identity was built almost entirely around Catholicism, with the French language playing a secondary role. A small anti-clerical movement did emerge in the early 19th century, drawing on the American and French liberal revolutions. This current ran through the Parti canadien and the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1837.

  In the more open political environment that followed the rebellions, the more radical anti-clerical tendency eventually formed the Parti rouge in 1848. In English Canada, a parallel tension developed between the primarily Nonconformist Reform movement, mostly Presbyterian and Methodist, and an Anglican establishment in Upper Canada.

  The deep religious differences between the French Parti rouge and the English Reformers were one reason the two groups struggled to cooperate during the era of two-party coalition government from 1840 to 1867. By 1861 the two factions had fused into a united Liberal bloc. After Wilfrid Laurier became party leader, the Liberals dropped their anti-clerical stance and went on to dominate Canadian politics through much of the 20th century. Liberal prime ministers since then have been overwhelmingly Catholic, among them St. Laurent, Pierre Trudeau, Justin Trudeau, Chretien and Martin.

  The clearest break came in Quebec during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, which ended the church's hold on provincial politics. The Quebec Liberal Party embraced social democratic ideas that had previously been taboo, and the provincial government took over health and education, fields that had long been dominated by the church. Quebec is now regarded as Canada's most secular province. Pierre Trudeau, as justice minister under Pearson, had earlier legalized homosexuality and streamlined divorce, and Paul Martin legalized same-sex marriage, each step widening the distance between the federal Liberal tradition and official Catholic teaching.