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Pius VIII, who reigned only eight months under the thumb of his all powerful Secretary of State, Cardinal Albani; and Gregory XVI, the creature of Metternich, and like him a devotee of the anti-revolu- tionary policy. Gregory was by nature an unselfish monk, who de- spite all his traits of an ecclesiastical monarch of the old style, which his secretaries Bernetti and Lambruschini encouraged him to foster, was none the less aware that the civil administration of the Papal States would surely lead to disaster.
The continuous decline toward catastrophe that was to characterize an Italy ruled by the Popes and Austria took place against the brighter background of universal Church history. In France the religious re- vival was based upon the spiritual achievement of Romanticism and upon the power of the reactionary part)'. The clergy, the religious Orders, and ecclesiastical influence on public life all grew, but so did the opposition of revolutionary liberalism to throne and hierarchy. Though Charles X was closely allied with the Church, he was com- pelled in 1828 to sacrifice the Jesuit schools. After the Polignac Min- istry had issued its ordinances against electoral and journalistic free- dom, the throne of the Bourbons fell. The excesses and depredations of the July Revolution of 1830 compelled Catholics to face a new situation. Acting on Papal advice, they recognized the government of Louis Philippe, the bourgeois king, and joined the ranks of the new movement. The leader was Lamennais, who with the young Count Montalembert, Pere Gerbert and Pere Lacordaire founded the journal UAvenir. Their slogan was "For God and Liberty/* and under this caption they demanded separation of Church and State. Lamennais * doctrine of a sens commun now embodied a naturalistic impulse, which undermined faith in the supernatural. In 1832 Gregory XVI con- demned L'Avenir. Montalembert and Lacordaire submitted sin- cerely but Lamennais, who accompanied them to Rome, could not get over this humiliation. Now, "he hung on the Cmss the Jacobin cap,*' against which he had set out to do battle. His next books con- stituted a glowing appeal to the peoples of the world to free them- selves "from the bondage of priests and tyrants/' He separated him- self from his friends, and his friends separated themselves from him. They joined with others to labour as "new sons of the Crusaders," In the pulpit, in nursing the poor and the sick, in writing books and
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