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Anti-clericalism is opposition to clergy, typically in social or political matters. Historically, anti-clericalism in Christian traditions has been opposed to the influence of Catholicism. Anti-clericalism is related to secularism, which seeks to separate the church from public and political life.Luke W. Galen. The Nonreligious: Understanding Secular People and Societies. Oxford University Press, 2016. p. 20
Some have opposed clergy on the basis of moral corruption, institutional issues and/or disagreements in religious interpretation, such as during the Protestant Reformation. Anti-clericalism became extremely violent during the French Revolution, because revolutionaries claimed the church played a pivotal role in the systems of oppression which led to it. Many clerics were killed, and French revolutionary governments tried to put priests under the control of the state by making them employees.
Anti-clericalism appeared in Catholic Europe throughout the 19th century, in various forms, and later in Canada, Cuba, and Latin America. According to the Pew Research Center several communist and post-communist states are current practitioners of political anti-clericalism, including Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, China and North Korea.
The anti-clericalism during the French Revolution initially began with attacks on church corruption and the wealth of the higher clergy, an action with which even many Christians could identify, since the Catholic Church held a dominant role in pre-revolutionary France. During a two-year period known as the Reign of Terror, the episodes of anti-clericalism grew more violent than Europe would see until the rise of state atheism in communist Eastern Europe. The new revolutionary authorities suppressed the church; abolished the Catholic monarchy; nationalized church property; exiled 30,000 priests and killed hundreds more. Many churches were converted into "temples of reason", in which services were held. (2013). 9781108067720, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781108067720Latreille, A. FRENCH REVOLUTION, New Catholic Encyclopedia v. 5, pp. 972–973 (Second Ed. 2002 Thompson/Gale) Tallet (1991):1 There has been much scholarly debate over whether the movement was popularly motivated.Tallet, Frank Religion, Society and Politics in France Since 1789 pp. 1-17 1991 Continuum International Publishing As part of the campaign to dechristianize France, in October 1793 the Christian calendar was replaced with one reckoning from the date of the Revolution, and Festivals of Liberty, Reason and the Supreme Being were scheduled. New forms of moral religion emerged, including the deistic Cult of the Supreme Being and France's first established State religion atheism Cult of Reason,Fremont-Barnes, p. 119. with all churches not devoted to these being closed. In April and May 1794, the government mandated the observance of a festival of the Cult of the Supreme Being. When anti-clericalism became a clear goal of French revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries seeking to restore tradition and the Ancien Régime took up arms, particularly in the War in the Vendée (1793 to 1796). Local people often resisted dechristianization and forced members of the clergy who had resigned to conduct Mass again. Eventually, Maximilien Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety denounced the dechristianization campaign and tried to establish their own religion, without the superstitions of Catholicism.Censer and Hunt, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution, pp. 92–94.
When Pope Pius VI took sides against the revolution in the First Coalition (1792–1797), Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Italy (1796). French troops imprisoned the Pope in 1797, and he died after six weeks of captivity. After a change of heart, Napoleon then re-established the Catholic Church in France with the signing of the Concordat of 1801, and banned the Cult of the Supreme Being. Many anti-clerical policies continued. When Napoleonic armies entered a territory, monasteries were often sacked, and church property secularized.
In 1880 and 1882 Benedictine teaching monks were effectively exiled. This was not completed until 1901.
A law of 7 July 1904 prevented religious congregations from sponsoring and conducting schools, and the Law on the separation of the Churches and the State of 1905, were enacted under the government of Radical-Socialist Émile Combes. Alsace-Lorraine was not subject to these laws, as it was part of the German Empire.
In the Affaire des Fiches (1904–1905), it was discovered that the anti-clerical War Minister of the Combes government, General Louis André, was determining promotions based on the French Masonic Grand Orient's card index on public officials, detailing which were Catholic and who attended Mass, with a view to preventing the promotion of Catholics. (footnote 26) cites :
In the years following their relocation outside France, boarding schools of congregants were accused by some senators of trying to "recruit" French youth from abroad, supposedly placing the French Republic "in jeopardy".
Republicans' anti-clericalism softened after the First World War as the Catholic right-wing began to accept the Republic and secularism as allies against socialism. In the present day, the issue of subsidized private schools, which are overwhelmingly Catholic but whose teachers draw pay from the state, remains a sensitive issue in French politics, and the Fédération Nationale de la Libre-Pensée, now commonly associated with the anti-clerical far-left, maintains its strongly anti-clerical stance.
Joseph decreed that Austrian bishops could not communicate directly with the Roman Curia. More than 500 of 1,188 monasteries in Austro-Slav lands (and a hundred more in Hungary) were dissolved, and 60 million florins taken by the state. This wealth was used to create 1,700 new parishes and welfare institutions.
The education of priests was taken from the Church as well. Joseph established six state-run "General Seminaries". In 1783, a Marriage Patent treated marriage as a civil contract rather than a religious institution.
Catholic historians have claimed that there was an alliance between Joseph and anti-clerical Freemasons."In Germany and Austria, Freemasonry during the eighteenth century was a powerful ally of the so-called party, of 'Enlightenment' (Aufklaerung), and of Josephinism".
Bismarck accelerated the Kulturkampf, which did not extend to the other German states such as Bavaria (where Catholics were in a majority). As one scholar put it, "the attack on the church included a series of Prussian, discriminatory laws that made Catholics feel understandably persecuted within a predominantly Protestant nation." Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominican Order and other orders were expelled in the culmination of twenty years of anti-Jesuit and antimonastic hysteria.Michael B. Gross, The war against Catholicism: liberalism and the anti-Catholic imagination in nineteenth-century Germany, p. 1, University of Michigan Press, 2004
In 1871, the Catholic Church comprised 36.5% of the population of the German Empire, including millions of Germans in the west and South, as well as the vast majority of Poles. In this newly founded Empire, Bismarck sought to appeal to liberals and Protestants (62% of the population) by reducing the political and social influence of the Catholic Church.
Priests and bishops who resisted the Kulturkampf were arrested or removed from their positions. By the height of anti-Catholic measures, half of the Prussian bishops were in prison or in exile, a quarter of the parishes had no priest, half the monks and nuns had left Prussia, a third of the monasteries and convents were closed, 1800 parish priests were imprisoned or exiled, and thousands of laypeople were imprisoned for helping the priests.Richard J. Helmstadter, Freedom and Religion in the Nineteenth Century (1997), p. 19
The Kulturkampf backfired, as it energized the Catholics to become a political force in the Centre party and revitalized Polish resistance. The Kulturkampf ended about 1880 with a new pope Leo XIII willing to negotiate with Bismarck. Bismarck broke with the Liberals over religion and over their opposition to tariffs; He won Centre party support on most of his conservative policy positions, especially his attacks against socialism.
After World War II, anti-clericalism was embodied by the Italian Communist (PCI) and Italian Socialist (PSI) parties, in opposition to the Vatican-backed party Christian Democracy (DC). Since the PSI joined DC-led coalition governments, the DC under Aldo Moro turned centre-left. In 1978, with support of the PSI, the DC-led coalition government legalized abortion despite strong opposition from the Catholic Church and DC conservative factions.
The revision of the Lateran treaties during the 1980s by the PSI Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, removed the status of "State religion" of the Catholic Church, but still granted a series of provisions in favour of the Church, such as the eight per thousand law, the teaching of religion in schools, and other privileges.
In recent years, the Italian society has got increasingly secularized and many contest the intervention of the Catholic Church in Italian politics, usually through voting instructions to the faithful and to Catholic parliamentarians on the legislative and regulatory action of the State. For example, the positions of Cardinal Camillo Ruini in the 2005 Italian fertility laws referendum attracted criticism, and so did his opposition to a 2007 bill that would have provided recognition of same-sex unions in Italy. From the side of the Church, a right to express its opinions and a moral duty in guiding Christians on ethical questions is claimed.
In modern Polish media anti-clericalism is/was promoted by magazine NIE and Roman Kotliński's newspaper .
In 1836 following the First Carlist War, the Ecclesiastical Confiscations of Mendizábal () promulgated by Juan Álvarez Mendizábal, prime minister of the new regime abolished the major Spanish Convents and Monasteries.Germán Rueda Hernánz, La desamortización en España: un balance, 1766-1924, Arco Libros. 1997.
Many years later the Radical Republican Party leader Alejandro Lerroux would distinguish himself by his inflammatory pieces of opinion.
By law, they were now property of the Spanish State, to which the Church had to pay rent and taxes continuously in order to use these properties. "Thus the Catholic Church is compelled to pay taxes on what was violently taken from her".Dilectissima Nobis 1933, § 9–10 Religious vestments, liturgical instruments, statues, pictures, vases, gems and other valuable objects were expropriated as well.Dilectissima Nobis 1933, § 12
During the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939, Catholics largely supported Franco and the Nationalist forces. Anti-clerical assaults called the Red Terror by Nationalists, included sacking and burning monasteries and churches and killing 6,832 members of the clergy.
This number comprises:
There are accounts of Catholic faithful being forced to swallow rosary beads, thrown down mine shafts and priests being forced to dig their own graves before being buried alive. The Catholic Church has several martyrs of the Spanish Civil War and beatification hundreds more.
Prior to the Falangists joining Francisco Franco's unified alliance of right-wing parties, the party exhibited anti-clerical tendencies, and saw the Catholic Church as an elite institution that presented an obstacle to the Falangist's full control the state. Despite this, the Falangists had not been involved in any massacres of Catholics, and it went on to support the Church as a result of their alliance to monarchists and other nationalist movements.
Rodrigo Duterte, the country's previous president, has adopted a combative verbal stance toward the Church hierarchy and its Liberal elite. In 2015, he blamed and cursed Pope Francis for the traffic congestion in the Metro Manila; he later apologized and clarified that it was the government's fault and not the pope's. In 2019, he predicted the Church's temporal demise in 25 years. Duterte, however, has underscored that his animosity toward the Church was purely personal and warned the otherwise uninvolved public against taking unethical action against the clergy.
At the same time in English Canada, a related phenomenon occurred where the primarily Nonconformist (mostly Presbyterian and Methodist) Reform movement conflicted with an Anglican establishment. In Upper Canada, The Reform Movement began as protest against the "establishment" of the Anglican church.
The vastly different religious backgrounds of the Reformers and rouges was one of the factors which prevented them from working together well during the era of two-party coalition government in Canada (1840–1867). By 1861, however, the two groups fused to create a united Liberal block. After 1867, this party added like-minded reformers from the Maritime provinces, but struggled to win power, especially in still strongly-Catholic Quebec.
Once Wilfrid Laurier became party leader, however, the party dropped its anti-clerical stance and went on to dominate Canadian politics throughout most of the 20th century. Since that time, Liberal prime ministers have been overwhelmingly Catholic (St. Laurent, both Pierre and Justin Trudeau, Chrétien, Martin), but since the 1960s Liberals have again had a strained relationship with the Catholic church, and have increasingly parted with the Catholic church's teachings on sexual morality, as when Pierre Trudeau legalized homosexuality and streamlined divorce (as justice minister under Pearson), and Martin legalized same-sex marriage.
In Quebec itself, the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s broke the hold of the church on provincial politics. The Quebec Liberal Party embraced formerly taboo social democratic ideas, and the state intervened in fields once dominated by the church, especially health and education, which were taken over by the provincial government. Quebec is now considered Canada's most secular province.
The slowness to embrace religious freedom in Latin America is related to its colonial heritage and to its post-colonial history. The Aztec, Maya and Inca Empire cultures made substantial use of religious leaders to ideologically support governing authority and power. This pre-existing role of religion as ideological adjunct to the state in pre-Columbian culture made it relatively easy for the Spanish conquistadors to replace native religious structures with those of a Catholicism that was closely linked to the Spanish throne.
Anti-clericalism was a common feature of 19th-century liberalism in Latin America. This anti-clericalism was often purportedly based on the idea that the clergy (especially the prelates who ran the administrative offices of the Church) were hindering social progress in areas such as public education and economic development.
Beginning in the 1820s, a succession of liberal regimes came to power in Latin America. Some members of these liberal regimes sought to imitate the Spain of the 1830s (and revolutionary France of a half-century earlier) in expropriating the wealth of the Catholic Church, and in imitating the 18th-century benevolent despots in restricting or prohibiting the religious orders. As a result, a number of these liberal regimes expropriated Church property and tried to bring education, marriage and burial under secular authority. The confiscation of Church properties and changes in the scope of religious liberties (in general, increasing the rights of non-Catholics and non-observant Catholics, while licensing or prohibiting the orders) generally accompanied secularist and governmental reforms.Norman, The Roman Catholic Church an Illustrated History (2007), pp. 167–72
Following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the new Mexican Constitution of 1917 contained further anti-clerical provisions. Article 3 called for secular education in the schools and prohibited the Church from engaging in primary education; Article 5 outlawed monastic orders; Article 24 forbade public worship outside the confines of churches; and Article 27 placed restrictions on the right of religious organizations to hold property. Article 130 deprived clergy members of basic political rights. Many of these laws were resisted, leading to the Cristero War of 1927–1929. The suppression of the Church included the closing of many churches and the killing of priests. The persecution was most severe in Tabasco under the atheist"Peter Godman, "Graham Greene's Vatican Dossier" The Atlantic Monthly 288.1 (July/August 2001): 85. governor Tomás Garrido Canabal.
The church-supported armed rebellion only escalated the violence. US Diplomat Dwight Morrow was brought in to mediate the conflict. But 1928 saw the assassination of President Alvaro Obregón by Catholic radical José de León Toral, gravely damaging the peace process.
The war had a profound effect on the Church. Between 1926 and 1934 at least 40 priests were killed.Van Hove, Brian Blood-Drenched Altars Faith & Reason 1994 Between 1926 and 1934, over 3,000 priests were exiled or assassinated.Scheina, Latin America's Wars: The Age of the Caudillo (2003), p. 33
Where 4,500 priests served the people before the rebellion, in 1934 there were only 334 priests licensed by the government to serve fifteen million people, the rest having been eliminated by emigration, expulsion and assassination. Scheina, Robert L. M1 Latin America's Wars: The Age of the Caudillo, 1791–1899 p. 33 (2003 Brassey's) It appears that ten states were left without any priests.
The Cristero rebels committed their share of violence, which continued even after formal hostilities had ended. In some of the worst cases, public school teachers were tortured and murdered by the former Cristero rebels. It is calculated that almost 300 rural teachers were murdered in this way between 1935 and 1939.
La Violencia refers to an era of civil conflict in various areas of the countryside between supporters of the Colombian Liberal Party and the Colombian Conservative Party, a conflict which took place roughly from 1948 to 1958. p. 68, Both Livingstone and Stokes quote a figure of 200,000 dead between 1948–1953 (Livingstone) and "a decade war" (Stokes) Azcarate quotes a figure of 300,000 dead between 1948–1959 Political violence is not new to that South American nation of 38 million people. In the past 100 years, more than 500,000 Colombians have died in it. From the "War of the Thousand Days," a civil war at the turn of the century that left 100,000 dead, to a partisan clash between 1948 and 1966 that claimed nearly 300,000... On April 9, 1948, Gaitán was assassinated outside his law offices in downtown Bogotá. The assassination marked the start of a decade of bloodshed, called La Violencia (the violence), which took the lives of an estimated 180,000 Colombians before it subsided in 1958.
Across the country, militants attacked churches, convents, and monasteries, killing priests and looking for arms, since the conspiracy theory maintained that the religious had guns, and this despite the fact that not a single serviceable weapon was located in the raids.
When their party came to power in 1930, anti-clerical Liberals pushed for legislation to end Church influence in public schools. These Liberals held that the Church and its intellectual backwardness were responsible for a lack of spiritual and material progress in Colombia. Liberal-controlled local, departmental and national governments ended contracts with religious communities who operated schools in government-owned buildings, and set up secular schools in their place. These actions were sometimes violent, and were met by a strong opposition from clerics, Conservatives, and even a good number of more moderate Liberals.
Liberal anti-clericalists of the 1880s established a new pattern of church-state relations in which the official constitutional status of the Church was preserved while the state assumed control of many functions formerly the province of the Church. Conservative Catholics, asserting their role as definers of national values and morality, responded in part by joining in the rightist religio-political movement known as Catholic Nationalism which formed successive opposition parties. This began a prolonged period of conflict between church and state that persisted until the 1940s when the Church enjoyed a restoration of its former status under the presidency of Colonel Juan Perón. Perón claimed that Peronism was the "true embodiment of Catholic social teaching" – indeed, more the embodiment of Catholicism than the Catholic Church itself.
In 1954, Argentina saw extensive destruction of churches, denunciations of clergy and confiscation of Catholic schools as Perón attempted to extend state control over national institutions.Norman, The Roman Catholic Church an Illustrated History (2007), pp. 167–8
The renewed rupture in church-state relations was completed when Perón was Excommunication. However, in 1955, he was overthrown by a military general who was a leading member of the Catholic Nationalist movement.
A number of countries have practiced state atheism. Most of them, though not all, were . In the Soviet Union, anti-clericalism was expressed through the state; in the first five years alone after the Bolshevik revolution, 28 bishops and 1,200 priests were executed.
Shia Islam, on the other hand, has had a doctrine of a centralized clergy in the imamate. Thus, by extension, the practice of taqlid has historically been more systematic. For example, as of the 19th century the Shia ulama taught believers to turn to the highest ranking clerics, known as "sources of taqlid" ( marja' at-taqlid).
Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran—the one Muslim country where Shia form an overwhelming majority—even more systematic power was given to clerics. Under the doctrine of rule by Islamic jurists, or , Islamic clerics must rule or Islam will whither away. A cleric is head of state in Iran, and clerics control many powerful governmental positions.
As "sanctioned by sacred law and religion", Akhund believes, a theocratic government can only be formed by the infallible Imam. Aqa Buzurg Tehrani also quoted Akhund Khurasani saying that if there was a possibility of establishment of a truly legitimate Islamic rule in any age, God must end occultation of the Imam of Age. Hence, he refuted the idea of absolute guardianship of jurist. Therefore, according to Akhund, Shia jurists must support the democratic reform. He prefers collective wisdom () over individual opinions, and limits the role of jurist to provide religious guidance in personal affairs of a believer. He defines democracy as a system of governance that enforces a set of "limitations and conditions" on the head of state and government employees so that they work within "boundaries that the laws and religion of every nation determines". Akhund believes that modern secular laws complement traditional religion. He asserts that both religious rulings and the laws outside the scope of religion confront "state despotism". Constitutionalism is based on the idea of defending the "nation's inherent and natural liberties", and as absolute power corrupts, a democratic distribution of power would make it possible for the nation to live up to its full potential.
In 1925, Rezā Khan proclaimed himself shah of the country. As part of his Westernization program, the traditional role of the ruling clergy was minimized; Islamic schools were secularized, women were forbidden to wear the hijab, sharia law was abolished, and men and women were desegregated in educational and religious environments. All this infuriated the ultraconservative clergy as a class. Rezā Khan's son and heir Mohammad Reza Pahlavi continued such practices. They ultimately contributed to the Islamic Revolution of 1978–79, and the Shah's flight from his country.
When Ayatollah Khomeini took power a month after the revolution, the Shah's anti-clerical measures were largely overturned, replaced by an Islamic Republic based on the principle of rule by Islamic jurists, , where clerics serve as heads of state and judges, veto legislation they consider un-Islamic and control who may run for president or parliament. However, by the late 1990s and 2000s, anti-clericalism was reported to be significant in the Iran:
Demonstrators using slogans such as "The clerics live like kings while we live in poverty!" One report claims "Working-class Iranian lamented clerical wealth in the face of their own poverty," and "stories about Swiss bank accounts of leading clerics circulated on Tehran's rumor mill."Molavi, Afshin, The Soul of Iran, Norton, (2005), p.163
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