Catholicism and Political Modernisation. "Paradox of Intellectualism" in the Political History of Europe

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This research project aims to describe the life and ideas of three German Catholic leaders and present a clear vision of the confrontations between the Catholicism and its intellectual critics in modern and contemporary Europe. The first subject of investigation, Bogdan Count von Hutten-Czapski (1851-1937), was a Polish-Prussian aristocrat in the German Empire, who supported the premodern Prussian patriotism and monarchy, while confronting with the modern German or Polish nationalism and democracy. My work "The Dream of a Multinational Prussia. The Blue Internationals and the Order of Europe", a biography of Hutten-Czapski, has already been published (The Nagoya University Press, 2009). The second subject, Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger : 1927-), is one of today's leaders of European Conservatism and heads the reconsideration of the Second Vatican Council, which intended to reform the Eurocentric and anti-intellectual nature of the Catholic Church. Benedict's ideas and struggles against the intellectuals in the world are discussed in detail in my paper "Pope Benedict's Fight" (Bulletin of the Society of German Studies in Japan, 2011). The third subject, Prince Archbishop Carl-Theodor Baron von Dalberg (1744-1817), cooperated in spite of his status as German Chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire intimately with Napoleon, the Emperor of the revolutionary France, and was therefore criticised posthumously by German Nationalists in the 19th century as a traitor of the country. A biography of Dalberg is now in progress.