France’s Roman Catholic Church is scheduled to baptize more than 10,000 adults on Easter Sunday, ... However, beginning with the violent secularism of the French Revolution in 1789, ...

A new history of the Catholic Church manages to avoid ideology lives up to its ambitions, ... An image depicts burning royal carriages at the Chateau d'Eu during the French Revolution, c. 1848.

McGreevy cites a French observer’s account of the gathering’s anti-worldly spirit: “The church, through its supreme pastor, says to the lay world, to lay society, and to lay authorities: It ...

John T. McGreevy’s exhaustive “Catholicism: A Global History From the French Revolution to Pope Francis” explains how debates within the church got so fierce.

Notre-Dame, and many churches in France, are owned by the state and merely used by the church. That gave the French government, and President Macron, a big voice in the restoration project.

The French revolutionaries, on the other hand, were trying to destroy French society as they knew it and start over with something else. Bloodshed was in the revolution’s DNA.