As late as the early 18th century in the era of the Enlightenment, Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, preacher to Louis XIV, defended the doctrine of the divine right of kings and absolute monarchy in his sermons.
The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, voted by the National Constituent Assembly, seemed to some in the church to mark the appearance of the antichrist, in that they excluded Christian morality from the new "natural order".
Italian unification culminated in Garibaldi's capture of Rome in 1870, which ended the Catholic Church's temporal sovereignty and led Pope Pius IX to declare himself a prisoner in the Vatican.
[6] The encyclicals Au Milieu des Sollicitudes and Graves de communi re of Pope Leo XIII from the late 19th century established the Church's official commitment to both Catholic social teaching and Christian democracy, which promoted democracy as the best type of governance as long as it worked to the "benefit the lower classes of society", promoted common good and rejected individualism in favor of communitarianism, and opposed what Leo XIII called "individualistic liberal" capitalism.
[9] Pius XII also endorsed parliamentary democracy as a moral necessity in his 1944 address Benignitas et Humanitas, and Pope John XXIII explicitly supported religious freedom in Pacem in Terris.
[9] These reforms eventually resulted in the Second Vatican Council, which affirmed previous teachings and established the Church as an advocate for human rights - the Catholic clergy actively opposed authoritarian regimes, and cooperated with secular resistance against them.
Papal legate to Yugoslavia, Ettore Felici, successfully petitioned the Vatican to forbid "active participation in movements of a patriotic and national character" in Croatia, and the Holy See opposed the "Croat rebellion against the Yugoslav state".
According to Richard J. Wolff, "although the government continued to force thousands of Orthodox Serbs to convert to Roman Catholicism and to inflict the most outrageous crimes upon countless others, the Croatian hierarchy never ceased to demand an end to this abuse.
"[10] Condemnations of the clergy continued, undermining the regime's claims of its Political Catholicism, and Archbishop Stepinac "vigorously upheld the rights of the Church and minorities against the Pavelic clique".
[11] As the situation turned violatile and street violence in Spain continued to escalate, Catholic clergy urged the population to stay calm, and the Cardinal Francisco Vidal y Barraquer strongly condemned calls for violent uprising against the government amongst monarchist and right-wing groups.
[13] Many Spanish priests, such as Leocadio Lobo of San Gínes denounced the Francoist cooperation with the fascist governments of Germany and Italy, and thus considered backing Franco incompatible with Catholic teachings.
"[16] Because of this, the Church soon became a base of anti-Francoist resistance in Catalonia; in 1957, an exile Catalan nationalist newspaper in Venezuela Solidaritat Catalana noted that "There is a strong tendency on the part of many Catholic sectors to adopt a combative attitude against the regime.
[12] Hank Johnston and Jozef Figa also argue that in Spain, "the church was crucial in the nationalist and working-class wings of the anti-Francoist movement",[19] and the growing opposition to the dictatorship intensified in the 1960s thanks to Vatican II, which made the regime start "fining priests for their sermons, jailing members of the clergy, and considering the expulsion of a bishop, thereby risking the excommunication of the government".
Maurras' personal secretary, Jean Ousset, later went on to found the Cité catholique fundamentalist organization along with former members of the OAS terrorist group created in defense of "French Algeria" during the Algerian War.
According to John Hellman, "Not long before he died, Lenin told a French Catholic visitor that "only Communism and Catholicism offered two diverse, complete and inconfusible conceptions of human life".
[23] The clergy as well as Catholic nationalist circles and newspapers such as the Catholic Bulletin focused on what they considered "the absence of a spirit of Gaelicism or an active sense of nationality", condemning English-language literature as a sign of Ireland being "shackled by an alien tongue",[23] attacking perceived non-Gaelic or "adventitious" elements in the post-WWI Irish society and stressing the need to revive the traditional Hidden Ireland, devoid of Anglo-Irish influences, as definited by Daniel Corkery.
Despite this, the influence of the clergy was not necessarily pushing the country in a right-wing or reactionary direction, as Irish priests envisioned political Catholicism as a force that should adhere to the ideals of Christian democracy, Gaelicism and moderation.
Commenting on the rise of fascism in interwar Europe, Giuseppe Pizzardo condemned "fascist totalitarianism" as being "at the opposite extreme from the Christian and Catholic conceptions of social existence, the state, and international relations.
[30] In 1929, La Civiltà Cattolica, one of the oldest Catholic periodicals in Italy and one that is directly controlled and revised by the Holy See, harshly condemned fascism and compared Mussolini's attitude towards the Church to Napoleon's.
[36] Following the implementation of the racial laws, fascist informers remarked that "the clergy and the practising Catholics make clear that they deplore, as persecution, the measures aimed at the Jews".
[42] As such, Catholics in the 1920s Italy were left-wing, largely immune to Blackshirt agitation and were ready to enter "workers' unity" alliances with socialist trade unions for the sake of anti-fascism.
[44][46] According to Italian historian Emma Fattorini, Vatican was increasingly concerned about the rise of Nazism in Germany, and Pope Pius XI believed that National Socialism is a larger threat to Catholicism than Communism.
Reinhard Heydrich considered Catholicism a fierce opponent of National Socialism, citing "the hostility constantly displayed by the Vatican, the negative attitude of the bishops towards the Anschluss as typified by the conduct of Bishop Sproll of Württemberg, the attempt to make the Catholic Eucharistic Congress in Budapest a demonstration of united opposition to Germany, and the continued accusations of Godlessness and of destruction of church life made by Church leaders in their pastoral letters.
Conway remarks that "the Christian tradition increasingly came to be seen as an element of resistance against Nazi influence", and the Sicherheitsdienst reports often mentioned widespread "anti-German or anti-Nazi attitudes of the Slovak clergy".
Humanitarian efforts by the clergy were in conflict with the racial policies of the Slovak government, and anti-Semitic actions of the regime were often presented as a product of German interference, imposed on Slovakia against the will of the population.
Conway notes that the Catholic clergy were ready to join the insurgents, and after the German suppression of the uprising, many in Slovakia saw the country as having to choose between submission to Germany or surrender to the advancing Russian armies.
In 1930s Belgium, the Vatican and the local clergy promoted Christian democracy as the basis of political Catholicism - far-right movements were often denounced as foreign and German; De Wever notes that "the socialists, liberals and Christian movements fought the FNL as a fascist and pro-German party – for good reason: Staf De Clercq and some of the other FNL leaders had secret contacts with the Abwehr, the German military secret service".
When the leader of collaborationist FNL, Staf De Clercq, died in 1942, the Catholic Church refused to organise his funeral, forcing the ceremony to be secular and open-air.
Catholic nationalists continued to play an important role in the politics of Argentina, while the Church itself was accused of having set up ratlines to organize the escape of former Nazis after WWII.
Antonio Caggiano, Archbishop of Buenos Aires from 1959 to 1975, was close to the fundamentalist Cité catholique organisation, and introduced Jean Ousset (former personal secretary of Charles Maurras, the leader of the Action française)'s theories on counter-revolutionary warfare and "subversion" in Argentina.