A French war minister secretly blocked promotions for officers who attended Mass
In 1904 France learned that its war minister, General Louis André, had been deciding army promotions with the help of a card index kept by the Masonic Grand Orient. The files noted which officers were Catholic and who went to Mass, so that believers could be held back. The scandal became known as the Affair of the Cards.
That episode was one flare in a long European struggle over the power of clergy. During the Reformation, critics targeted the clergy's political and economic privileges. In Austria, Emperor Joseph II, who reigned until 1790, took aim at contemplative orders he considered useless to the community. More than 500 of 1,188 monasteries in the Austro-Slav lands were dissolved, and the 60 million florins seized helped fund 1,700 new parishes and welfare institutions. He also moved priestly training into state seminaries and in 1783 recast marriage as a civil contract.
Revolutionary France went further. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790 required priests to swear loyalty to the state; all but seven of 160 bishops refused, along with about half the parish clergy. The new authorities seized church property and exiled some 30,000 priests. In 1793 a revolutionary calendar replaced the Christian one, and churches were turned into temples of reason. Napoleon later restored the Church through the Concordat of 1801, though his armies still sacked monasteries in conquered lands.
Germany had its own culture struggle, the Kulturkampf. From 1871 Otto von Bismarck sought to curb the Catholic Church in Prussia, courting liberals and Protestants, then 62 percent of the new empire. At the height of the campaign half the Prussian bishops were jailed or exiled and a quarter of parishes lacked a priest. It backfired: Catholics rallied behind the Centre party, and around 1880 Bismarck settled with the new pope, Leo XIII.
Back in France, the Third Republic's Jules Ferry laws of 1881 and 1882 made schooling free and removed clerics and religious lessons from state classrooms, and a 1905 law separated church and state. Alsace-Lorraine, then part of Germany, escaped these laws. In Italy, the pope called himself a prisoner of the Vatican after the Papal States fell in 1870, a standoff eventually settled with Mussolini in the Lateran Accords of 1929.
Source: Anti-clericalism
