Acknowledging Messiaen’s occasional but consistently appreciative references to theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, especially with respect to the theological aesthetics as presented in The Glory of the Lord (Herrlichkeit), this chapter provides a theological and Trinitarian description of Balthasar’s notion of doxa, or “glory,” which may well have influenced Messiaen’s compositions. For Balthasar, “glory” as a theological concept is neither merely aesthetic nor religiously triumphalist, but remains tangled together with transcendental beauty in Western metaphysics, theophany, kenoticism ( “ self-emptying”), a cruciform Christology, eschatology, and apocalyptic thought.

Although it is a truism of understanding Messiaen to assert that Roman Catholicism was profoundly important to him and his music, it can be difficult to understand what this actually means in the face of two millennia of the church’s unfolding history with its countless controversies between theological schools, monastic orders, and religious politics. This chapter explores how Messiaen’s musical theology was colored by the remarkable legacy of St. Francis of Assisi. While attending to ways that Messiaen’s towering achievement, the opera Saint François d’Assise, expresses the Franciscan spirit, it also asserts that the Franciscan influence can also be discerned in Messiaen’s representational subject matter (particularly his bird style and his several works on the Nativity of Jesus), as well as in his focus on color, joy, and an unsettling inclusivity.

This chapter explores Messiaen’s relationship with Charles Tournemire, particularly focusing on how Tournemire understood Messiaen and how this relationship was seminal and fruitful to both composers. Of primary importance is the role of organ improvisation and the type of apocalyptic Catholicism espoused by Tournemire as a context for Messiaen’s art.

Montesquieu famously concluded in The Spirit of the Laws that each form of government has an animating principle—a set of “human passions that set it in motion”—and that each form can be corrupted if its animating principle is undermined. Maryland is a compelling case study of Montesquieu’s theory: founded in 1632 by Lord Baltimore as a haven for Catholics, a mere two decades later that animating principle was dead. This chapter explores why. Specifically, the chapter examines the birth, death, and resurrection of Maryland’s animating principle by identifying with as much precision as possible the impact of the law itself on regime change in colonial Maryland.

In the late nineteenth century, the passion play at Oberammergau in Bavaria became a major international sensation whose decennial performances attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors from across Europe and the wider world. This chapter argues that nineteenth-century observers increasingly understood Oberammergau not only as a site for the re-enactment of the biblical past, but also as a provocative example of the open-air ritual theatre they associated with Greek antiquity. Historians often associate nineteenth-century German philhellenism with Protestant elites, but this chapter shows how an unambiguously Catholic phenomenon, the Oberammergau passion play, took on special resonance among those who were inspired by the call for Dionysian theatre associated with Friedrich Nietzsche at the fin de siècle. The analysis especially focuses on three German-speaking dramatists – Richard von Kralik, Oskar Panizza and Friedrich Lienhard – for whom the purportedly Greek qualities of Oberammergau prompted reflection on the possibilities and limitations of Dionysian drama as a tool of artistic, moral and national regeneration.

This chapter argues that the religious policies of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) are not limited to its frequently noted anti-Puritan satire but are also concerned with Catholic dissent and, more generally, the question of the theatre’s legitimacy and effect on its audiences. The play’s parody of martyrdom arguably reflects the discourse of pseudo-martyrdom to which the Oath of Allegiance controversy had given rise after the Gunpowder Plot and which deeply divided English Catholics, who faced a choice between recusancy, conformity, or some form of semi-conformity. Jonson’s satirical portrayal of Puritans who unsuccessfully attempt to remain ‘religious in midst of the profane’ thus also speaks to Catholic concerns that conformity may eventually lead to an erosion of dissent. This chapter further argues that the Pauline theology of things indifferent is fundamental to the play’s ideological structure and informs both its treatment of religious dissent and the legitimacy of the theatre. Despite its comic resolution, Bartholomew Fair ultimately amounts to a coercive imperative of inclusion that undermines opposition both to the theatre and to the Established Church.

Written during his Catholic years, Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall (1603) portrays the tyrannical regime of the Roman Emperor Tiberius and his favourite Sejanus, who aggressively lay claim to the inward secrets of their political opponents. Despite the play’s ostentatious historical accuracy, its concerns and vocabulary are thus frequently reminiscent of Elizabethan Catholic complaints about religious persecution under Elizabeth I. However, rather than simply condemning dissimulation as a response to persecution, Sejanus His Fall offers a rationale for prudent accommodation of a tyrannical regime that is grounded in a neo-Stoicist disjunction between inward and outward self and in a differentiated understanding of parrhesia, the rhetoric of free speech. Even though Jonson’s attitude towards dissimulation thus merits reconsideration, Sejanus simultaneously expresses deep distrust in theatricality, which is grounded not only in neo-Stoicist ethics but also in the Platonic association of the theatre with tyranny and the inherent theatricality of Machiavellian power politics.

This chapter discusses the collaboratively written Sir Thomas More in the context of Catholic outrage over the breakdown of the Elizabethan policy of outward conformity in the 1580s and 1590s and the various means by which the Elizabethan regime made windows into men’s hearts in the late sixteenth century, including espionage, oaths, and torture. The play’s insistent Senecan intertext, which revolves around questions of silence and treason, thus becomes legible in relation to late Elizabethan legislative developments that served to penalise silence in matters of religion. As this chapter argues, the play’s biographical treatment of the famous Catholic martyr, who never specifies the convictions for which he is executed, thus reflects the predicament of Elizabethan Catholic loyalists, such as Anthony Browne, first Viscount of Montague, who were concerned with maintaining an increasingly untenable sphere of silence as a middle ground between truth and dissimulation.

By 1911 some Irish couples were limiting fertility. Marital fertility fell slowly after independence. The gap between family size in Northern Ireland and Ireland and between Catholic and Protestant families widened. The Irish Free State introduced legislation restricting access to information and prohibiting the sale and importation of contraceptives, legislation that reinforced Catholic teaching. Although similar legislation existed in other countries, it had much less impact than in Ireland. The near-universal practice of religion by men and women meant that Catholic teaching could be enforced in the confession box, and this teaching, combined with the valorisation of large families by Irish society, provided uncaring husbands with a licence to procreate, irrespective of the health or the wishes of their wife. Before the 1960s there was little information available about the ‘safe period’, a church-permitted method of regulating fertility, which was promoted by Catholic organisations in other countries. By 1961, despite marrying at a later age, Irish couples had the largest families in the western world, their fertility was seriously out of line with Catholics elsewhere.

Central to the history of family planning in Ireland is the interaction between religious observance and expressions of Irishness, and how that changed in response to domestic political and socio-economic developments, and international forces. An Irish identity imagined around rural living, Catholicism, large families, traditional gender roles, and sexual puritanism, combined with a belief that Ireland could withstand the changes that were underway in twentieth-century western society in relation to sexual behaviour – drove the sustained hostility to legalising contraception. The 1980s was the decade when it became evident that the tide had turned. The number of married women in the workforce rose significantly, and fertility fell sharply. By the early 1990s Irish fertility was still the highest in Europe, but only by a small margin, and it was lower than in the United States. And yet the decline of this imagined Irishness was not unopposed; indeed, many lamented its passing. it is significant that the moral legislation enacted in the first decades after independence survived until the closing decades of the twentieth century, which might suggest that Ireland was exceptional.

No western country experienced as protracted a debate on contraception as Ireland. The longstanding ban on contraception has commonly been seen as the consequence of Catholic church teaching and the near-universal religious observance by Irish Catholics. But the Irish debate went far beyond Catholic teaching. The merits of large families and the laws banning contraception (as well as prohibition of divorce and abortion) came to be seen as a symbol of Ireland’s national identity; the Irish approach to contraception was intimately bound up with ideas of Irishness. The logic of opposition to the use of contraception shifted over the decades. Initially, the belief that ‘artificial’ contraception was contrary to the teaching of the Catholic church was the engine that drove state policy and broader opposition. By the 1970s this argument was being abandoned, in favour of claims that permitting contraception would destroy the fabric of the family and society. The battle to protect Irish society from the “menace” of contraception, abortion and divorce continued into the present century in the face of falling fertility, many single mothers, and a significant abortion trail to Britain.

By March 1793 revolutionary France was at war with Austria, Prussia and Spain, and Britain was preparing a naval blockade. The National Convention responded to this desperate military situation by imposing a levy of 300,000 conscripts. In the west of France the levy was the trigger for massive armed rebellion and civil war, known, like the region itself, as ‘the Vendée’. The insurrection resulted in terrible loss of life before it was finally crushed in 1794. Estimates have ranged from exaggerated claims of 500,000 rebel deaths to more accepted recent estimates of up to 170,000 insurgents and 30,000 republican troops. The rebellion and its repression left deep and durable scars on French society and politics. In republican historiography, the scale of repression of the rebellion has been seen as a regrettable but necessary response to a military ‘stab in the back’ at the moment of the Revolution’s greatest crisis, whereas right-wing politicians and historians from the west of France have applied the label of ‘genocide’ to the repression and therefore to one of the foundation acts of the first French republic. This chapter argues that ‘the Vendée’ was not a genocide: huge numbers of people were killed, but not because they were a distinctive Vendéan people nor because they were devout Catholics. This was instead a brutal civil war studded with examples of atrocity which would later be known as ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘war crimes’.

Chapter 11 explores France’s Catholics’ reactions to the religiously laden references of the Rassemblement National (RN) and Éric Zemmour. It finds that in spite of historical animosities and the abiding policy clashes between the far right and Catholic values, beliefs and institutions identified in Chapter 10, French Catholics’ traditional religious immunity to the far right has begun to erode since the mid-2010s. Whilst this development chronologically coincided with the emergence of the conservative Catholic movement around the Manif pour Tous, the analysed evidence suggests that Catholics’ electoral opening towards the populist right was primarily driven by political and religious supply-side factors. In particular, the narrowing of electoral alternatives for Catholics and the softening of the bishops’ language against the populist right, in the context of the church’s gradual shift from a politically engaged national church, towards a more inward-looking minority church, have contributed to the relative dédiabolisation of the RN and Zemmour amongst Catholics.