Gerberga of Saxony, the sister of Otto I of Germany and wife of Louis IV of France, receives frequent scholarly mention in relation to a treatise by Adso of Montier-en-Der circa 950–954. The topic of this short work, presented as a letter to Gerberga in answer to a question she posed to the monk, was the life of the Antichrist, that fearful servant of Satan who would appear before Christ's Second Coming, lead whole nations into damnable error, and kill many who would not apostatize before being defeated by Jesus himself at his return. The treatise eventually become the foundation of centuries of Christian apocalyptic thought. But despite her prominence in the letter, Gerberga has received no sustained examination by historians regarding her interest and promotion of apocalyptic thought beyond being a recipient of Adso's letter. At most, scholars tend to see Gerberga as if through the eyes of Adso, that is, as a nervous queen anxious to be reassured that a universal evil is not hiding just around the corner. Such views—wholly unintentional but nevertheless present—do her a great disservice and misunderstand the motivations of both Gerberga and Adso present in the letter, as well as Gerberga's younger, apocalyptically minded in-law, the empress Adelaide. This essay examines Gerberga's life not simply as it relates to Adso's work but in relation to the very personal, family-driven politics of both East and West Francia in the tenth century. When placed in her proper context, we find Gerberga was not merely a passive recipient of apocalyptic ideas for a brief period in the early 950s but was an active patron whose interest shaped imperial politics for generations.

The early modern Philippine archipelago is often described as being under the power of a frailocracy with a far-reaching impact. From a microhistorical approach of ecclesiastical contentiousness, I argue that the intermittent clashes between and inside the two pillars of colonial rule—the civil and ecclesiastical powers—belie the church's overarching control over state affairs. The church was not a monolithic unit in the Philippines, but was rather highly fragmented, especially in distant Asian enclaves, and it was not independent, but relied on royal patronage, diplomacy, and transnational networks. Using archival materials, official reports, religious manifestos, and royal appointments and decrees, I focus upon two significant case studies of the two exiled archbishops of Manila, Fray Hernando Guerrero, OSA, and Felipe Pardo, OP, to explore factionalism, negotiation, and microlevel political constellations as a way to approach conflicting church–state relations in seventeenth-century Philippines from a more nuanced perspective.

Adoniram Judson is widely perceived as the pioneer Bible translator in Burma. His translation of the entire Bible into Burmese, however, built upon three centuries of Roman Catholic missionary outreach. Catholic priests had arrived as chaplains for Portuguese immigrants to Burma in the early sixteenth century, but an indigenous Burmese Catholic church was established within a generation through intermarriage. Barnabite missionaries arrived in the early eighteenth century and engaged in a dynamic hundred years of missionary work. These Catholic missionaries developed key Christian terminology and discourse that Judson drew upon in his translation work. British Baptists were also in Burma for several years before Judson arrived and made their own contribution to Burmese Bible translation. An analysis of the Burmese translations of the Lord's Prayer by Barnabite missionary Giovanni Maria Percoto (1776), British Baptist James Chater (1812), and Judson (1817 and 1832) demonstrates how Judson both drew upon and developed the work of his predecessors in his immense project of translating the entire Bible into Burmese (1840). The Judson Bible, still the most widely used and highly esteemed version in modern-day Myanmar, is an intertextual production. Literary and oral texts, all shaped by their historical settings, intersected multiple other texts over a period of three hundred years before flowing into Judson's translation.

Far from being limited to denunciations of modernity, nineteenth-century Catholic thought had a programmatic and visionary side. This article deals with the models of community put forward by Lamennais in L'Avenir, Antonio Rosmini, Luigi Taparelli d'Azeglio, and Wilhelm Ketteler. These writers reimagined the foundations of public life against the claims of self-interested individualism and state omnipotence. Three theses in particular capture their vision of the future polity: 1) societies, which were not “mechanisms,” needed Catholicism as animating spirit; 2) political representation should be “organic”; and 3) whereas the liberal elites imposed their vested interests on the common people, the Catholic polity reflected their needs and beliefs. The four writers envisaged a community of the gentle and caring, which, like the family, was hierarchical, self-governed, local, and supportive. In contrast, it was argued that the people had no voice under liberalism because the elite's values were not the people's and because the political system was a mere arena for the clash of special interests. This was a communitarian and populist Catholicism, prizing self-government, denouncing parliamentary politics, and siding with “the people.”

Emilio Comba, a leading Waldensian historian in the nineteenth century, was a strong advocate for nation-building in post-unification Italy. This article examines the relationship between Comba's “making Italians” endeavors and his historical writings, focusing mainly on his appropriation of the preceding confessional framework. As a fervent nationalist and evangelical pastor, Comba believed that true Risorgimento required not only political independence but also a religious reform of the Italian nation that would restore Italians to the original Religion of Christ. He envisioned this national reform as a realization of both liberty and the Gospel within the universal history of the Christian religion. Comba employed historical writings to support his claims, attempting to demonstrate how Italy was a perennially Protestant nation on the one hand and to serve as a magistra vitae for fellow citizens on the other. This article argues that Comba relied on a genealogical narrative structure inherited from the early modern protestant historiography in presenting his national history. By recasting its composition according to a category of the nation, he transformed a confessional genealogy of the true church into a national one. From a broader perspective, this article calls for further reflection on the role that the early modern intellectual framework played in the process of modern nation-building.

The activity of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński as the Primate of Poland occurred in a period when Poland did not maintain diplomatic relations with the Holy See. The period between 1948 and 1981 can be divided, from the perspective of the Warsaw authorities, into three subperiods: no relations and no talks (informal and official), 1948–1965; negotiations, 1965–1974; and working contacts, 1974–1981. The years 1964–1978 were also the period of the apogee of the Vatican's Ostpolitik carried out by Msgr Agostino Casaroli, under the auspices of Pope Paul VI. Cardinal Wyszyński was directly involved four times in talks on the arrangement of Polish–Vatican relations: in 1951, 1957, 1963, and 1965. With time, however, the primate gained more and more distance from the purposefulness of establishing relations between the Holy See and communist states. It should be added that from the beginning of the 1970s, the primate was quite critical of the effects of the Vatican's so-called Ostpolitik. At the end of the pontificate of Paul VI, an open conflict arose between the Secretariat of State and the Primate of Poland, which was resolved only with the election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope.

Approximately one third of the world is Christian, and half of those are Roman Catholics. The demographics alone make writing a global history of Catholicism a mammoth task. To attempt the impossible, Professor John T. McGreevy of Notre Dame University has tackled a theme that plays itself out over multiple centuries and diverse cultural settings—the conversation, negotiation, tension, and conflict between traditionalism and modernization. Given that conservatism and progressivism shift meanings according to historical context, the implications of each position in situ are complex and surprising. Only a scholar of McGreevy's maturity and erudition could hope to succeed in such a bold enterprise.

I spent much of the first decade of the 2000s writing a book about the Catholic Church in nineteenth and twentieth-century Vietnam. I came to the topic as a scholar of Vietnam, and very much not as a scholar of modern Catholicism. In the project's early stages I searched high and low for a general history to fill in the (many) gaps in my knowledge of the subject. The best I could find was Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett's 2003 Priests, Prelates & People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750. This book, although excellent and still worth reading, is squarely grounded in scholarship written from an older national and regional approach to the Church's modern history. It essentially ignores the fact that in the modern era more than ever before, Catholicism's historical epicenter in Europe was irreducibly tied to the rest of the world not only through the Ultramontane Church but also through the circulation of ideas and the printed word, migration, and (above all) European imperialism, and that the Church's institutional and cultural evolution since the eighteenth century is incomprehensible outside of such frameworks (Atkin and Tallett devote an astounding 5 of their 333 pages of text to the European empires in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, which made up two-thirds of the global Catholic population at the time they finished their book).

John T. McGreevy's chronicle of modern Roman Catholic history is a vivid and sometimes jarring reminder of the historical depth of contemporary divisions within the Church, especially as these enter the public sphere. Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis elucidates the church's ambivalent response to the challenge of modernity over the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries, specifically the rise of democratic nation states, anti-colonialist movements from the global south, the struggles of poor and working people for liberation, and feminist and human rights movements. The spread of totalitarianism and the supposed triumph of capitalism represented a different set of challenges for the church in this period.

John McGreevy's Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis hinges on seismic events that shook the foundations of the Catholic Church: the French Revolution, its aftershocks in many European nations, and the devastating effects of the Napoleonic Wars that followed. The episcopalism of Catholicism that arose from the ashes of the revolution seemed to reject the pillar of its globalism, namely the papacy. Pius IX paid for this with his life. Eternal Rome suddenly became mortal, overtaken by the revolutionaries. Catholic schools were nationalized. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy enacted an agenda for the secularization of society, the church itself, and its institutions. Notre Dame became a “Temple of Reason,” and the chalices and ciboria of Saint-Sulpice were melted down to make cash. The damage done to the church by this revolution was paralleled only by the communist revolutions of the twentieth century.

John McGreevy has written a book of such breadth and erudition as to daunt a would-be reviewer. How to evaluate so formidable an achievement? One could, of course, devote one's allotted paragraphs exclusively to praise, all of which would be merited. (McGreevy's engaging prose would come in for prominent mention.) But what then of the critical eye that every reviewer hopes to train on even the most accomplished work of scholarship? McGreevy himself suggests a way out: “Specialists will regret what is missing,” he notes in the book's introduction, “and rightly so.” Given the remarkable range of subjects the book actually covers, however, quibbling over its inevitable omissions seems neither charitable nor fruitful. Best, perhaps, to “think out loud” about the impact of McGreevy's global perspective on my own assumptions as a historian of American Catholicism. Needless to say, his is a book from which I learned a great deal.

My thanks to the reviewers for their insightful comments and to the editors of Church History, most especially Jon Butler, for shepherding the reviews. Having once served as a Church History editor, I appreciate his labors even more.