Ulrich Lehner, a professor of theology at Marquette University, has previously written a history of the Benedictine monasteries of eighteenth-century Bavaria, which played a key role in the intellectual revival in the Catholic world during the Enlightenment. The Catholic Enlightenment, a term used to describe this intellectual fervour and also to characterise legal and religious reforms in the Habsburg Empire under the Emperor Joseph ii, is understood by Lehner in a much larger context. His aim is to correct the prejudice that Catholicism is seen as an opponent to science, enlightenment and modernity. According to Lehner, ‘long before there was a Pope Francis, there existed an open-minded Catholicism that was in dialogue with cutting-edge intellectual trends’ (p.3). To this end, this book has two aims: to describe this ‘open-minded Catholicism’ and to ask why this history has been forgotten. In this second endeavour, Lehner succeeds very well. In his introduction and conclusion he describes the profound upheaval that the French Revolution wrought on the Catholic Church: the declaration of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, de-Christianisation, the September Massacres in 1792 that claimed the lives of many priests and nuns, the dissolution of monasteries and the rampages of the revolutionary army in the Catholic Vendée. The successor to the revolution, the Bonapartist regime, dealt further blows, chief of which was the dissolution of the Imperial Church (and with it, the Holy Roman Empire) and the humiliation of the papacy. Out of that débâcle, however, there emerged one figure of moral courage: the resistance and imprisonment of Pope Pius vii made him the undisputed centre of Catholicism in a restored world, one that was deeply hostile to ideas of the Enlightenment, seen as the radical roots of the French Revolution. A Catholic revival based on romantic nostalgia for a medieval past repudiated the ideas of the Catholic Enlightenment. Catholicism and modernity were juxtaposed as opposites, a position affirmed in the First Vatican Council. Recovering from the profound shock of the revolutionary years, the Catholic Church willed itself into a rigid conservatism that lasted until the Second Vatican Council.

Lehner, indeed, has answered this question well: ‘Why has this history been lost?’ He is, however, less successful in describing this Catholic Enlightenment in the eighteenth century because in his broad search for historical figures and examples, the analysis and narrative lose focus. This story is told in seven chapters that cover the widest possible number of themes. In chapter i, ‘Catholic enlighteners around the globe’, Lehner discusses the German bishop Nikolaus von Hontheim, better known under his pseudonym Febronius, who advocated a conciliar government of the Church, and the Spanish Benedictine monk, Benito Feijoo, who advocated an openness toward science and argued for dialogue with Protestants and Jews. These are just two of the many figures mentioned in this chapter, most of them little known by historians, which shows a Catholic world that was far from monolithic or reactionary during the Enlightenment. In chapter ii Lehner narrates the history of toleration and tolerance, giving examples from France, Poland, the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg lands. Confessional co-existence in Central Europe and the reforms under Emperor Joseph exemplified the progressive elements in Catholic Europe, as opposed to the official conservatism of Pope Benedict xiv, whose personal liberal ideas none the less earned him the sobriquet of ‘papa protestante’. Chapter iii is a wide-ranging description of feminism, freedom and faith. It deals with gender equality, women scientists, sex, birth control, abortion, breastfeeding and love, as well as ‘proto-feminism’ in the female religious orders. Catholic Enlightenment in the Americas, China and India is the subject of a brief treatment in chapter iv, followed by a more substantial treatment of the themes of ‘Devils, demons, and the divine’ in chapter v and ‘Saints and sinners’ in chapter vi. These chapters represent the strongest in the book and analyse changing and conflicting views regarding witchcraft, magic, superstition, medicine and healing, martyrdom and canonisation. Lehner brings to the reader's attention little known episodes that signalled the spirit of the age and offers interesting observations on Benedict xiv, Ludovico Muratori and many other figures. The tight focus of these two chapters is regrettably lost in chapter vii, in which Lehner surveys slavery in the Catholic world, offering brief glimpses of New Orleans, Maryland, Brazil, Malta and the papacy, in addition to discussing Catholic voices in the abolitionist debate and African confraternities.

It is obvious that the subjects and questions listed above would require substantial treatment in many monographs. While it is admirable of Lehner to offer a short synthesis of this multi-faceted world, The Catholic Enlightenment does not quite measure up to the author's intellectual ambitions. In his laudable attempt to cover as wide-ranging a spectrum as possible, the narrative often loses focus and becomes a series of interesting episodes and short commentaries on little-known individuals. It would have been a stronger book if Lehner had adopted a narrower understanding of Catholic Enlightenment and restricted himself to a more focused discussion of the relationship between Church and State, modernity and Catholicism in the eighteenth century.