By Henri Daniel-Rops

The Church of the Classical Age: The Era of Great Splintering is the seventh installment in Henri Daniel-Rops’ magnificent History of the Church of Christ. This volume concludes the examination of the “churches outside the Church,” treating John Wesley and Methodism, the Protestant origins of the United States, and the religious awakening in “Holy Russia”; sifts through the “storm and stress” afflicting the Church—from the suppression of Jesuits and emergence of Josephism to the fateful First Partition of Poland and the ever-increasing signals of impending revolution across Europe; and, lastly, offers an encouraging account of healthy ecclesial, cultural, and political developments as well as portraits of the saintly Remnant, from the humble St. Benedict Joseph Labre and St. Paul of the Cross to the brilliant St. Alphonsus of Liguori, which together promised a bulwark against the imminent onslaught of rebellion and disorder.

Bearing within it a secret wound, the neo-classical order could not hope for ever to resist the forces that were about to attack. The exaltation of man without reference to God was destined to result in man’s claim to be independent of God. (Henri Daniel-Rops)

The eighteenth century saw the Church—and, indeed, the world—stand as upon the knife’s edge; “stray but a little” and they would fail. With Daniel-Rops’ typical talent for engaging historical narrative, The Church of the Classical Age: The Era of Great Splintering chronicles the steps (and mis-steps) that brought the Church into the harsh light of the scaffold and reveals the grace which empowered her to “preserve her loyalties intact.”

Henri Daniel-Rops (1901–1965), the nom de plume of Henri Petiot, was a French Catholic historian. His bibliography comprises seventy books—written over a span of just thirty years—and includes Sacred History, Jesus and His Times, and the monumental, ten-volume History of the Church of Christ. He also served as editor for the Twentieth Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism, which consisted of one hundred and fifty volumes. Phenomenally successful in his own time, Daniel-Rops made religious history accessible and popular; in 1955, he was elected to the Académie française and in 1956 he received the Order of St. Gregory from Pope Pius XII.

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Paperback: 244pp.

ISBN: 978-1685952877