Losing a Kingdom Gaining the World

<p><b>An ambitious, authoritative history of the Roman Catholic Church in the modern age.</b><br><br>Despite its many crises, especially in Western Europe, there are still 1.2 billion Catholics in the world and the Church remains a powerful, controversial and defiantly archaic institution. <br><br>After the French Revolution and the democratic rebellions of 1848, the Church retreated, especially under Pius IX, into a fortress of unreason, denouncing almost every aspect of modern life, including liberalism and socialism. The Pope proclaimed his infallibility; the cult of the Virgin Mary and her apparitions to semi-illiterate shepherds 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. <br><br>In <i>Losing a Kingdom, Gaining the World</i>, Dr Ambrogio A. Caiani narrates the epic, fascinating, entertaining and horrifying history of the Roman Catholic Church. It is an account of th