Inventing the Modern Papacy

The nineteenth century brought unremitting conflict over the Papal States. As temporal sovereignty slipped from the pope’s hands in the Italian peninsula, the papacy developed into a soft power on a global scale. This transformation was driven both by the papacy’s conscious efforts to reinvent itself, and by increasing lay Catholic support in the face of mounting challenges: war, revolution, the rise of nationalism and increasing secularization. Though the reinvention of Church government entailed divisions among Catholics, it eventually allowed the pope to develop a new authority, subtler yet firmer than the one before. This volume tells the story of this profound transformation from the point of view of social, political and cultural history.