Losing a Kingdom, Gaining the World

An ambitious, authoritative history of the Roman Catholic Church in the modern age. Despite its many crises, especially in Western Europe, there are still 1.2 billion Catholics in the world and the Church remains a powerful, controversial and defiantly archaic institution. After the French Revolution and the democratic rebellions of 1848, the Church retreated, especially under Pius IX, into a fortress of unreason, denouncing almost every aspect of modern life, including liberalism and socialism. The Pope proclaimed his infallibility; the cult of the Virgin Mary and her apparitions to semi-illiterate shepherds became articles of faith; the Vatican refused all accommodation with the modern state, until a disastrous series of concordats with fascist states in the 1930s. In Losing a Kingdom, Gaining the World, Dr Ambrogio A. Caiani narrates the epic, fascinating, entertaining and horrifying history of the Roman Catholic Church. It is an account of the Church's fraught encounter with modernity in all its forms, from representative democracy and the nation state to science, literature and secular culture.