Abstract

Between the French Revolution and the Second Vatican Council, alongside a magisterium of anathemas against the modern world born of this Revolution and against the concessions made to political modernity by liberal Catholics, culminating in Pius IX's Quanta Cura, another operation unfolded on the part of Rome, describable as "diplomatic" in a broad sense. One thinks in particular of the instructions for rallying to the modern Republic given by Leo XIII to French Catholics in his 1892 encyclical Au milieu des sollicitudes. But there have been other acts before and since that enter into this perspective, by which the Holy See seemed to contradict, for the benefit of established liberal powers, its condemnation in principle of the institutions on which these same powers rested: the coronation of Napoleon, the "second Ralliement" of the 1920s, the abandonment of the Cristeros for "reasons of Church".