Henri Daniel-Rops

The Fight for God is the ninth volume in Daniel-Rop’s highly praised, monumental History of the Church of Christ which covers the period from 1870 to 1939. Daniel-Rops continues his story in this volume in the same lively, popular style for which he is so well known. He begins with a significant study of the attitudes of doubt created by Nietzsche, Marx, and other “prophets of darkness” who gave voice to their views during the second half of the nineteenth century. A general survey of the pontificates of Leo XIII, Pius X, Benedict XV, and Pius XI is then given and followed by an in depth, detailed consideration of each Pope’s reign, discussing the conflicts and problems encountered. On particularly absorbing account is the struggle Pius XI had against Communism, Fascism, and the early years of Nazism. The geographical expansion of the Church throughout the world during this period is next considered with special attention given to the developments occurring in the United States and Canada. Only a historian of the stature of Daniel-Rops is able to capture and record with profound insight an era filled with confusion and discord and packed with earth shattering events. A Fight for God is a masterwork of history which will give the reader new insights into the life of the Catholic Church.

Dust jacket notes: "This work deals with a century dominated by two forces: by the growth of national consciousness in Europe on the one hand (embodied in monarchical absolutism), and on the other by the resurgence of the spirit and ideals of Catholicism, threatened by the Protestant revolution. The author passes in review the great Catholic figures of the century, beginning with St. Vincent de Paul who, in humility and boundless charity, opened the gates of the century to a flood of saintly men and women, and to a new ideal, in the company of men like Berulle, Olier, St. John Eudes, St. Francois Regis, and women like Louise de Marillac, with whom he founded the sisters of Charity, Anne of Austria, Queen of France, and a host of others. This was an era of political and spiritual rebirth, but also an era of strife, selfishness, ambition and fanaticism. The ruthlessness of the conflict for religious supremacy is seen side by side with deep sincerity and the sorrow of noble figures, Catholic and Protestant alike, who strove towards unity. There is the spectacle of the nations of Europe rising up to form two camps, Protestant and Catholic, and the swift deterioration of the controversy into a bloody struggle for power, in which the mighty figure of the French king, Louis XIV, a much maligned monarch, whose conflict between his conscience and his self-glory was as tempestuous as his European wars, and led to the most extraordinary paradoxes; a king born into an age of absolutism, thrusting France to the top in European power politics, at a cost in men and material which nearly ruined her. Shining through all the strife is the great Catholic ideal of the century and the holiness of individuals, despite the growth of Jansenism and Quietism, and the beginnings of an irreligion that stemmed from heresy and internal discord."

Books on the councils of the Church are multiplying as the October opening of the Second Vatican Council nears. (Most recent are Archbishop Jaeger's The Ecumenical Council, the Church and Christendom -- supplement p. 103- and Hans Kung's The Council. Reform and Reunion -- supplement p. 1118.) Their approaches are distinctive. The new book from the prolific writer Henri Daniel-Rops is that, too. This volume on the Council is the first by a layman who is recognized as a scholar (general editor of the Twentieth Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism) and has a reputation for clarity and conciseness. In The Second Vatican Council he cuts through the technical verbiage so characteristic of ecclesiastical books. Essentially it is a popular history of the Councils with a philosophical flavor, mildly critical in its evaluations, and easy to read. The form he employs is to answer questions stated as topical headings, for example, ""Council and the Pope in Conflict?"". The answers he gives are honest. In the fashion of the encyclopedia, he states what most people want to know and then stops. Among the books on the Council this will receive considerable attention from a following which will accept it for its temperate but straightforward presentation and responsible scholarship.

Recorded facts about the mother of Jesus, gleaned from the Gospels and from Apocryphal writings, presented by a leading French Roman Catholic scholar.

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Deals with the Catholic Church in the period c. 350-1050. These are the centuries which saw the end of the Roman Empire in the West; the irruption of the Barbarians; the conversion first to Arianism and then to Catholicism of the Germanic peoples, and the consequent development of their spiritual and intellectual lives; the 'golden age' of Byzantium and the growing rift between it and Rome; the Moslem attack on Christendom and the Islamic conquest of the Holy Places, and Charlemagne's attempt to re-create the Western Empire in a Germanic, Christian form. The volume opens with a study of St. Augustine of Hippo stressing his influence upon the dark centuries which followed his death. This serves as a kind of preface for the rest of the work, which includes, within the general framework of the centuries it describes, detailed examinations of the most important individuals and events therein; these include sections dealing specifically with the two outstanding popes of the period, Leo the Great and Gregory the Great, with saints ranging from St. John Chrysostom and St. Boniface to St. Benedict, and with the principal secular rulers of the epoch -- Justinian and Theodora, Clovis, Heraclius, Irene and, of course, the great Charlemagne.