ABSTRACT
The Cold War was a time of fundamental transformation for the Catholic Church, as it witnessed the maturation and globalization of a Catholic modernization project whose beginnings date from the late nineteenth century. As the Cold War raged, the Catholic Church for the fi rst time in its history offi cially embraced – during the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 – freedom of conscience and dialogue with the modern world, and successive popes sought to expand the horizons of the Catholic imagination beyond Europe and the United States to the decolonizing Third World. These shifts were, at least in part, motivated by some of the same factors without which there would have been no Cold War: fi rst, the spread of Marxist revolutionary socialism in Europe’s fi n-de-siècle, and second, the rise of Communist political parties in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the resultant creation of the Soviet Union. The initiator of the Catholic Church’s modernization, Pope Leo XIII (reigned 1878-1903), was – like Karl Marx – responding to the “social question”: how to alleviate the suff ering of the masses of industrial working poor fl ooding the European continent by the late nineteenth century as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution.
