Challenges to the Church. Not since the Reformation of the sixteenth century had the Roman Catholic Church felt as threatened as it did during the second half of the nineteenth century. By the mid nineteenth century, many of the conservative governments that had allied themselves with the papacy following the Congress of Vienna in 1815 were threatened by revolutionaries who wanted to remake the established order. To many liberals, socialists, and nationalists imbued with the spirit of reform, the Roman Catholic Church appeared as an obstacle to progress. Equally disturbing to Christianity in general, and to the Roman Church in particular, was the spread of new scientific doctrines that questioned traditionally accepted truths concerning the age of the earth and the origins of life. Furthermore, the emergence of new approaches to the study of the past led many people, even in...