British missionary societies in Italy: evangelising a hostile land, 1850–1862

Abstract

The eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw an internationalisation of religion on a scale previously unknown. It was individual issues, such as the full-scale attack by Protestants against the temporal power of the Pope and, in the opposite field, the staunch defence of the Papacy in the 1860s, which catalysed a process of politicisation and transformation of these religions into ‘globally visible forces in civil society’, as Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene have recently argued.³ Moreover, it was in these transnational campaigns that Protestants and Catholics experimented with the full array of modern civic action: ‘from the press, petitions and subscription fundraising, through meetings and congresses, to mass manifestations and the ballot box’.⁴ In fact, the Roman Catholic Church equipped itself for the battle against liberalism and Protestantism with a modern press policy, ‘initiatives designed to secure mass appeal’, and a tightly organised executive structure able to ensure compliance and purge defective elements, as well as to police mass membership.⁵ These tools were widely used by both parties throughout the contested 1860s and it is striking that, in so doing, the ‘Religious Internationals’, according to Green and Viaene’s pertinent definition, ‘were often ahead of their better-known secular counterparts such as the socialist international or the peace movement.’⁶