The Church of the Revolutionary Age: A Fight for God

By Henri Daniel-Rops

(NB: Product contains two individual volumes.)

The Church of the Revolutionary Age: A Fight for God is the ninth install­ment in Henri Daniel-Rops’ outstanding History of the Church of Christ. A singularly unhappy age, alight with the blaze of revolution and war, the years 1870 to 1939 witnessed wave after wave of assault upon Christ and his Church. Lavish in detail, vigorous in analysis, and dramatic in telling, Daniel-Rops gives proof positive of Christ’s promise that the Church is built firmly upon rock, and the powers of death and gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

Volume 1 surveys (1) the dismal spiritual atmosphere produced in large part by Nietzsche and Marx, and the irreligious and totalitarian menaces to which it gave rise; (2) the life of the Church in this violent new age, and the four great popes who led the charge to combat its evils and its errors: Leo XIII, Pius X, Benedict XV, and Pius XI; (3) the papacy of Leo XIII, “the Pope of bold options,” and his labors to bring the wisdom of the Church to bear in the diplomatic and social spheres; (4) the march of Catholic social teaching, set forth by Leo XIII in Rerum novarum, and its acceptance by the working classes in the years leading up to World War I; and (5) the papacy of Pius X and “the interests of God”—the salvation of souls and the restoration of all things in Christ.

Volume 2 surveys (1) the crisis of Modernism, “the crossroad of all heresies”; (2) the outbreak of the Great War and Pope Benedict XV’s fight against the flames which laid unprecedented spiritual and material waste; (3) the continued success of Catholic social teaching and the rise of Catholic Action in the years after World War I, crowned by Pius XI’s Quadragesimo anno; (4) the papacy of Pius XI, “defensor fidei et hominis,” who rose to the unique and terrible challenge of confronting Communism, Facism, and Nazism; (5) the Church’s missionary work in the Americas, the East, and Africa, with portraits of the exemplary Damien of Molokai and Charles de Foucauld; and (6) the story of a soul, Thérèse of Lisieux, le petit modèle for the soldiers of Christ to fight the good fight. 

Would the world, by changing its foundations, get rid of God? (Henri Daniel-Rops)

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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