Losing a Kingdom, Gaining the World: The Catholic Church in the Age of Revolution and Democracy

Despite its many crises, especially in Western Europe, there are 1.3 billion Catholics in the world today. The Church remains a powerful but controversial institution.

In Losing a Kingdom, Gaining the World, Ambrogio A. Caiani explores the epic history of the Roman Catholic Church. Throughout the early modern period, the Pope was a secular prince in central Italy. Catholicism was not merely a religion but also a political force to be reckoned with.

After the French Revolution, the Church retreated into a fortress of unreason and denounced almost every aspect of modern life. The Pope proclaimed his infallibility; the cult of the Virgin Mary and her apparitions became articles of faith; the Vatican refused all accommodation with the modern state, until a disastrous series of concordats with fascist states in the 1930s.

These dark days threatened the very existence of the Church. But as Catholicism lost its temporal power, it made significant spiritual strides and expanded across continents. Between 1700 and 1903, it lost a kingdom but gained the world.

Ambitious and authoritative, this is an account of the Church’s fraught encounter with modernity in all its forms: from liberalism, socialism and democracy, to science, literature and the rise of secular culture.

Dr Ambrogio A. Caiani received his PhD from Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge in 2009. Since then he has taught at the universities of Greenwich, York and Oxford. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Kent. Caiani’s main research interests are Revolutionary France and Napoleonic Italy, and his work has been published in several leading academic journals. He is the author of Louis XVI and the French Revolution, 1789-1792 and To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII, which won the 2021 Franco-British Society book prize.