"Why did Roman Catholicism become the First World Religion?" - Simon Ditchfield, University of York March 26, 2012

Center for Early Modern History Workshop Series
1210 Heller Hall

Simon Ditchfield is a Reader in the Department of History at the University of York, where his research focuses on perceptions and uses of the past in previous societies, but particularly within the context of urban and religious culture in the Italian peninsula from c. 1300-1800. He is currently writing a major survey volume about the making of Roman Catholicism as a world religion (1500-1700) for the Oxford History of the Christian Church series to be published by Oxford University Press. His other interests include: politics and procedures of canonization; hagiography; history writing; history of scholarship; conditions of enquiry in Early Modern Europe (particularly relating to humanism, magic and science); and the history of travel. Among his many works, he is the author of Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (1995), Storia della Santita nel Cristianesimo Occidentale (with Anna Benvenuti, Sofia Boesch, Francesco Scorza Barcellona, Roberto Rusconi and Gabriella Zarri, 2005), "Decentering the Catholic Reformation: Papacy and Peoples in the Early Modern World" (2010), and "What Did Natural History Have to do with Salvation? José de Acosta SJ (1540-1600) in the Americas" (2010).

Viewed in global terms, the making of Roman Catholicism as a world religion appears far from inevitable. In 1500 CE, it was boxed into the western extremity of the Eurasian landmass by considerable Islamic powers: notably the Ottoman Empire to the East and the Kingdoms of Marrakech and Fez to the South. Furthermore, in East Asia, Islam had been enjoying a wave of continuous expansion for over a century. In the Americas, the Aztec and Inca Kingdoms had reached their pagan apogee, while the Middle Kingdom of the Ming had abandoned its flag-waving voyages as far as East Africa, under Zheng He, as an irrelevance to its continental concerns as Asia’s most considerable power. Babur, the great-grandson of Timur/Tamerlane, was poised to invade the Indian subcontinent and establish what came to be known as the Mughal Empire in which a Muslim minority ruled successfully for over two centuries over a Hindu majority.

Yet within less than a century, in the wake of the so-called ‘voyages of discovery’, the foundations had been laid for the making of the globe’s first world religion. It was not until 2006 that the number of Muslims overtook Roman Catholicism as the world’s most numerous religion (1.13 billion Catholics vs 1.3 billion Muslims) yet, given the negligeable number of Muslims in South America, Roman Catholicism is still the only religion with truly global diffusion. What was it that made this remarkable change in fortunes possible?

It has been explained variously as a result of Divine Providence, Colonialism and, most recently, in terms of a lethal cocktail of guns, germs, and greed-fuelled genocide. However, this does not adequately explain the degree to which non-European peoples from Manila to Mexico, Paraguay to the Philippines, made Roman Catholicism theirs so that today Latin America exports missionaries to Europe and there are more Catholics in Manila than in the whole of the United Kingdom (8m vs 4.8m).

Professor Ditchfield's paper will argue that the principal means by which this was achieved was the cult of saints.

Refreshments will be served

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