The Christian Churches and Politics in Europe, 1914-1939

The period between 1914 and 1939, which forms the subject of this contribution, therefore lacks an obvious unity in the history of Christian politics in twentieth-century Europe. The constitutional and public status of the Christian churches in European states had evolved over the preceding half-century in highly dissimilar ways. Yet, though pillarisation was a reaction against modernity, it also became the vehicle where by Europe's Christian communities entered into the modern world. The clergy, influenced by the new spiritual priorities of the papacy, generally preferred to step back from direct involvement in political life. The multiple crises, international and national, socio-economic and ideological, that swept across Europe after 1914 destroyed much of the Christian abstentionism from politics. A second, and subtler, change in the patterns of European politics was the decline in anti-clerical and more especially anti-Catholic politics. There was therefore no single path to political modernisation in Europe.