Originally published at crisis magazine
[Editor’s Note: This is the twenty-eighth in a multi-part series on the unsung heroes of Christendom.]
In an earlier essay in this series, we remarked how dispassionate or despondent observers at the beginning of the 19th century might have considered that the Catholic Church was terminally ill and on its deathbed. The previous century had seen the rise of despotic and absolutist monarchs who had usurped the rights of the Church as a means of subjecting religion to the power of the state.
This weakened Church was then subject to the terrors of the French Revolution which had sought to destroy the Church, replacing it with an atheistic secularist tyranny. In 1799 the imposition of a military dictatorship under Napoleon completed the metamorphosis of the Revolution from militant atheism to militaristic imperialism. In the same year, Pope Pius VI died as a prisoner of Napoleon, who had brought him to France following the French invasion of Italy. And so ended a century in which philosophical error had resluted in a reign of terror and the death in prison of a weak and politically powerless pope.
It was at this time that Napoleon is said to have threatened to destroy the Church, telling Cardinal
