ABSTRACT
After Catholics across the world had encountered persecution in the early nineteenth century, the tables turned in subsequent decades. A partial recovery of clerical influence in Europe, concordats between the Holy See and the new Latin American republics, a growing presence in Northern America, official toleration in parts of Asia, and increased missionary activity in Africa testified to changing Catholic fortunes. As Philip Dwyer writes, Catholics opposing French revolutionary politics saw their actions as part of a “Holy Crusade” against the “soldiers of Satan” and their attempt at establishing the “Kingdom of the Antichrist”. Such demonizing language helped Catholics to semantically purge their opponents from the community of faithful by drawing a line between the sacred and the profane. Having explored the forms of violence involving Catholics across the nineteenth-century world and the way Catholicism was treated as a category of difference worth fighting for or not, this chapter addresses the link between religion and violence more broadly.
