Solarian Catholicism and the Etrurian Revolution
Throughout the Etrurian Revolution and the subsequent Etrurian First Republic, Solarian Catholicism would play a pivotal role in both the ideological development of the revolution and the governance of the revolutionary republic it birthed. It served as the guide and keystone of the Society of Servants of Sotirias and the Liberties, also commonly known as the Pantheonisti in their evolution from a social debate club to revolutionary movement. Its importance would result in significant upheaval within both Etrurian society and the Catholic Church.
Catholicism’s central role originated from the personal religiosity of the Society of Servants, who though influenced by key enlightenment ideals were keen to infuse those with religion, rejecting rationalism and anticlericalism common in the late 18th century. They embraced the idea of liberty and freedom as God-given spiritual gifts, being political evolutions of Free Will. They further embraced republicanism as the natural system of governance for the full achievement of freedom and liberty for the individual and as the only system of governance that would facilitate a true moralistic and virtuous society. This belief system would evolve over time into the assertion that republican government would be the surest guarantor of Catholics achieving entry into heaven through the freedom to pursue good works and deeds.
The Society of Servants, once in total control over the nascent Tyrennian Republic and later the Etrurian Republic sought to implement its key ideals as codified as the Devotions of Heaven. The Republic’s virtues and constitution were underpinned by the Society’s interpretations of scripture – a source of great debate today and division at the time. The revolutionary regime implemented a series of popular campaigns aimed at instilling Sotirian morality and republican virtue, legitimising these and mobilising society via religious rhetoric, with the assistance of a majority of Etruria’s clergy who were sympathetic to the cause. This coincided with repression of religious minorities within the Republic and its occupied territories elsewhere and the wartime goal of uniting Catholic Euclea under a single Ecumenical Republic. Religion was also used to legitimise excessive violence seen during La Tempesta, and state-orchestrated hysteria and zealotry was a mainstay of revolutionary governance. The adoption of religiosity and empowering of revolutionary tribunals with powers usually held exclusively by the Catholic Church led many to describe the Etrurian Republic as a theocratic-republican system, a stark contrast to its contemporary Weranian Republic.
Many historians have debated the nature of religion in practice and theoretically within both the Pantheonisti movement and the Republic. There remains a debate as to whether the religiosity was “aesthetic” in nature to legitimise the regime, or consequential snowballing of a reactive state to events internally and externally against an organised and intentional adoption of politicised Catholicism as part of the wider theo-republican ideological design. The legacy of the First Republic in relation to religion would be lasting within Etruria and to a lesser extent, Gaullica. It would leave an Etrurian clergy long influential over the political and societal spheres, activistic and Catholicism being a defining facet of Etrurian national identity and nationalism. It would also mark one of the most profound periods of upheaval and division within the Catholic Church since the reformation.
Catholicism and the Pantheonisti
The Society of Servants of Sotirias and the Liberties, more commonly known as the Pantheonisti, from their inception in 1771 were defined by their intense personal faith. A social debate club based in a taverna beside the Basilica of Sol Invictus in Tyrrenhus, also known as the Pantheon, were dedicated to pursuing an infusion of enlightenment ideals with Catholicism. The Society’s founding members who would later go on to form the Consilium Supremum, the top-decision making body of the Republic, rejected rationalism and found liberty and freedom not to be incompatible with religion, rather faith would be the ultimate foundation of a successful republic. They believed that faith provided the moral and virtuous framework from which laws, justice and good governance would evolve.
The Society structured its political beliefs around its concept of “Man’s Duality” a theory published in a series of pamphlets during the early to mid-1770s, that determined human existence to be dependent upon their temporal and spiritual realities, which in turn were co-dependent. The temporal reality would be free and just through the existence of faith, while faith would be dependent on the freedom to exercise such belief without restraint temporally. The 1773 pamphlet wrote, “A Sotirian cannot be close to God nor obedient to His will if subject to the will of a corrupt creature like a King, nor will a Citizen be close to their fatherland and moral if denied the full potential of his faith.” The Duality they espoused also allowed the Society to differentiate between Free-Will of mankind with the General-Will of the population within the wider political context, however, they would also assign the sanctity of individual free-will with that of the majority.
Giovanni Paolo Mancera, On the Jubiliant Freedom in Sotirias Our Lord Eternal, 1777
The entwining of the temporal and spiritual would go on to influence virtually all future Society thinking and when in power, its policies and decisions. The most immediate example of this was the Society’s belief that liberty and freedom were temporal evolutions of God-given Free-Will and ostensibly proclaimed both to be spiritual gifts. As such, the Society came to view absolutism, despotism and manorialism as restrictions upon liberty and freedom, and as being God-given, the denial of which was viewed with intense hatred. The Society throughout its existence espoused and championed the writings of 16th century Povelian priest and ascetic, Romolo Vian. Vian preached monarchy to be an earthly creation, idolatry and a “foul mockery of the immaculate conception.” He stated that the original sin forbade any mortal man or woman being bestowed authority, power and mandated loyalty simply as a result of being born of the womb, while arguing that the only being worthy of adulation and loyalty simply for being born of the womb was Jesus Sotirias and monarchism therefore was tantamount to idolatry.
The Society close to the 1780s also began to champion beliefs that the Catholic faith in Euclea had begun a steady decline, and a return to what it described as the “Halcyon Age of Saint Peter’s Throne” was necessary if to truly deliver liberty and freedom. The Society claimed, primarily through Giovanni Paolo Mancera’s writings, that over the centuries the power of the Papacy had declined to the benefit of royal courts, denying Euclean denizens their rights, justice and freedom to live truly in accordance with the Catechism and Sotirian dogma.
The Society of Servants was fervently loyal to the Church even if the Papacy throughout its existence was among its chief critics and opponents. The Society of Servants dismissed pre-revolutionary arguments that the Catholic Church as an institution was incompatible to enlightenment ideals such as liberty, freedom and justice. Rather, the Society of Servants claimed the Catholic Church was the only institution to have already embraced such ideals. In a 1779 pamphlet, the group said, “there is no greater institution or body of mankind for the implementation of fair justice, of true equality before canon and law. A heretic is a heretic, regardless of his station. The mortal and temporal realm is what subjects the farmer, labourer and peasant to the inequities of impunity of the aristocrat.” In many ways, the Society saw the Catholic Church as a guarantor of liberty and freedom and actively established it as such following the Devotion of the Republic to Heaven, owing to its view of liberty and freedom as subsets of free-will. This is best exemplified by the invitation to Catholic priests and prelates to serve in prominent positions within certain Consistories of the Republic, notably the Revolutionary Tribunals.
The Church, or rather the Etrurian church was afforded considerable freedom and rights under the First Republic, even as the Republic sought to establish bodies nominally associated with the Church itself, including agencies dedicated to policing vice, virtue and its eventual conflation of loyalty to the cause with righteousness.