Inventing the Modern Papacy

The nineteenth century brought unremitting conflict over the Papal States. As temporal sovereignty slipped from the pope’s hands in the Italian peninsula, the papacy developed into a soft power on a global scale. This transformation was driven both by the papacy’s conscious efforts to reinvent itself, and by increasing lay Catholic support in the face of mounting challenges: war, revolution, the rise of nationalism and increasing secularization. Though the reinvention of Church government entailed divisions among Catholics, it eventually allowed the pope to develop a new authority, subtler yet firmer than the one before. This volume tells the story of this profound transformation from the point of view of social, political and cultural history. 

Author Biography

Carolina Armenteros, Ph.D. (2005, University of Cambridge) is Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences and Director of the Center for European Studies at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. She has published multiple books and articles on political and religious thought in the Age of Revolutions, including The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794–1854 (Cornell, 2011).

Francisco Javier Ramón Solans, Ph.D. (2012, University of Zaragoza/University of Paris 8) is Lecturer in Late Modern History at the University of Zaragoza. He has published monographs, edited volumes, and articles on 19th-century Catholicism, including Beyond the Andes: The Ultramontane Origins of a Latin American Church (1851–1910) (Brill, 2025).