ABSTRACT
Among Catholic historians, moreover, Pius X is generally regarded not as a political reactionary and anti-democrat so much as a strict constructionist defending the Church during a period of crisis. Catholicism, was demonstrated to be the enemy not of science per se, but rather of "scientism", that is, of the metaphysical reduction of the spiritual to the natural, and Catholic scholars, like those social Catholics who had embraced democracy but not political liberalism, now embraced science but not philosophical liberalism. Catholics enthusiastically joined the rising anti-positivist tide of the 1890's. The convergence of Catholic anti-liberalism with secular anti-positivism in the 1890's was applauded and encouraged by Pope Leo XIII, who was as willing to forge secular and cross-confessional alliances in his campaign to win wayward nations back to the Church as he was to make political alliances. They viewed the Separation as an opportunity to liberate their faith from both its secular political chains and a stagnant ecclesiastical bureaucratic hierarchy.
