The Church in the Seventeenth Century

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."