Why did the church condemn the elightenment?

Answer 1

Catholic AnswerThe Catholic Church is the Mystical Body of Christ, as such it cannot "hate" anybody or anything outside of sin - which, by definition, is the very negation of God. The philosophes, the French Deists who began the Enlightenment (which does not mean philosophers, but closer to the modern term "intellectuals"), proved themselves enemies of the faith from the very start. They placed their faith in reason alone, and called religion the creation of the "first knave and the first fool" (Marie-Jean Condorcet d. 1794 a philosophe of noble birth) contending that "its influence over society, especially in education, had to be destroyed. One of the more disgusting products of the Enlightenment was their "sexual revolution" in which common violations of the Sixth Commandment were justified - pornography, for instance, for the first time became a thriving industry. So, it wasn't so much that the Catholic Church hated the Enlightenment, but that the philosophes of the Enlightenment rejected the Catholic Church and all it stood for. François-Marie Arouet (a.k.a. Voltaire, d. 1778) saw Catholicism as all right for the ignorant peasants in his estates (for whom he built a chapel) but along with the other philosophes only trusted each other - the "educated, the enlightened"; the ignorant masses could not be trusted. (Extracted from History of the Catholic Church from the Apostolic Age to the Third Millennium, by James Hitchcock, Imprimatur: The Most Reverend Edward Rice, © 2012 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco

from Modern Catholic Dictionary by John A. Hardon, S.J. Doubleday & Co., Inc. Garden City, NY 1980

Enlightenment. The term used by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and then by others to describe man's coming of age from the state of infancy, in which he was incapable of using his own reason but depended on others, including an alleged revelation from God. The Enlightenment became a movement that has since affected much of the Western world.