What was the experience of the Roman Catholic Church during the Enlightenment?

Answer 1

Another answer from our community:

Answer by a CatholicI should think it was the same as any other era. The Church's experience is always that of dealing with sinful men and trying to bring God to them, and them to God. The Enlightenment had its own problems as many seemed to think that they didn't need God anymore and were just fine on their own. When you have been at this as long as the Catholic Church has, you start to see that there is nothing new under the sun, just sinful man continuing to try to do it on his own.

Answer 2

When challenged by sceptics during the Enlightenment, defenders of Catholic orthodoxy felt that history rather than natural philosophy appeared to support the notion that it was the Catholic Church which preserved "the faith once delivered to the saints" through its conservatism of doctrine.

Orthodox Catholics argued that there existed no positive scientific evidence to discount reports of miracles in the past, whereas they said there was a great body of historical writing to attest to their reality. In their view, the onus was therefore on those who wished to disprove rather than to prove the supernatural.

When the philosophers retaliated by pointing to similar claims of the miraculous which were made by non-Catholic heretics and infidels, Catholic apologists were led into the position of maintaining that genuine miracles could only be performed by the orthodox and that all other historical or contemporary claims were the result of deliberate frauds.

Robert Palmer has pointed out that such a defensive position could lead to absurdly anachronisric portrayals of the apostles and saints of Scripture as cool and impartial observers who, like their idealised eighteenth-century counterparts, accepted reports of the supernatural only after the most searching and exhaustive of empirical tests. This is a position which was easy for anticlerical philosophers of the Enlightenment to ridicule.