Uncompromising Catholicism and the so-called "modern world" of the mid-nineteenth-century - Regarding the religious freedom of liberal democracy engendered by the Enlightenment

The debate concerning the opposition between the hard-core, uncompromising Catholicism of the mid-nineteenth century and the "modern world" engendered by the enlightenments of the eighteenth century is permeating present hist oriography. It is a proven fact that this uncompromising Catholicism, which reproves "modernity", did not reject technological "modernization". Despit e initial hesitancies, it used it to develop its apostolate. But what about the principles which govern this modernization? To prevent the debate from remaining fixed between two rigid positions, we are offering here, as a wo rking hypothesis, a range of transaction between uncompromising Catholicism and the liberalism which constitutes the very back bone of modernity, a ra nge which goes from the acceptance, under certain conditions, of liberal de mocracy to the categorical refusal of moral liberalism, and which includes an incomplete evolution as regards religious freedom and societal organizat ion.