ABSTRACT
During the 1800s the Catholic Church was confronted by the advance of liberal and democratic ideas. Liberal democracy had been developed through a secularization process which assumed a conflict between faith and reason. During the 1820s a liberal Catholicism emerged, whose goal was reconciliation between the Church's political ethics and liberalism. The political and ecclesiological defence was given a philosophical foundation. Catholics too chose to work through party politics. A political Catholicism arose in several European countries, and eventually became organized in Catholic parties. Against the background of liberal forces within the Church wanting reconciliation between the Church and modern culture and politics, the pope promulgated in 1864 the admonitory encyclical Quanta Cura with the attached document, Syllabus which was to become far more famous than the encyclical itself. The individual citizen is self-legislating. Individual self-legislation and the laws of civil society are reconciled by a free, rational political discourse.
