The 1953 Concordat with Spain

The 1953 Concordat with Spain was the last of the classic Concordats of the Catholic Church.  It provides a fairly good, if somewhat late, example of Counter-Enlightenment Catholic thought applied in the political sphere.

The decline of monarchism in Counter-Enlightenment papal teaching

In this post, I want to sketch briefly the decline of overtly royalist and anti-democratic sentiments in the pronouncements of the Counter-Enlightenment popes.  As with other aspects of Counter-Enlightenment Catholicism, the turning point seems to have been the pontificate of Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903).

The blood libel - A view from 1911

This is a translation of the section on alleged Jewish ritual murder in the article "Jews and Christians" in the Dictionnaire apologétique de la foi catholique, published in 1911.  It is interesting insofar as it sheds light on contemporary attitudes towards the blood libel in the more respectable circles of Catholic Europe.  Essentially, the author is unwilling to endorse the blood libel as a whole, but he leaves open the possibility that ritual murders have sometimes been committed by Jews.

Barruel and the conspiracy theory of the French Revolution

This is an edited extract from a contemporary translation of Augustin Barruel's Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du jacobinisme, which I have referred to elsewhere.

Charles Maurras on the "Four Confederate States"

From Maurras's Dictionnaire politique et critique:

Jewish-Christian relations again

To go with my recent post on historical Christian antisemitism, here are some translated extracts from the article on "Jews and Christians" in the Dictionnaire apologétique de la foi catholique, published in 1911.

Review of "The Popes against the Jews" by David Kertzer

(Also published under the title Unholy War in the UK)

This is a book by the distinguished Jewish American scholar David Kertzer exploring the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people during the 19th and early 20th centuries.