The Catholic Church of the Long Nineteenth Century

Between the fall of Napoleon and the eve of the First World War, the Catholic Church lost a state and gained a papacy. Gregory XVI and then Pius IX met the liberal century head-on: Pius defined the Immaculate Conception in 1854, catalogued the errors of the age in the Syllabus of 1864, and in July 1870 saw the First Vatican Council define papal infallibility. Weeks before Italian troops entered Rome and ended the Papal States. Stripped of territory, the papacy grew in reach instead: bishops and ordinary Catholics looked to Rome as never before, new congregations of sisters and brothers staffed schools and hospitals across the world, and mass devotion gathered around Marian apparitions like Lourdes in 1858. Under Leo XIII the church that had spent decades condemning the modern world began to negotiate with it, most consequentially in Rerum Novarum (1891), which put the church on the side of a worker's right to a living wage and to organize.