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The relations between the Catholic Church and the state have been constantly evolving with various forms of government, some of them controversial in retrospect. In its history, the Church has had to deal with various concepts and systems of governance, from the Roman Empire to the medieval divine right of kings, from nineteenth and twentieth century concepts of democracy and pluralism to the appearance of left and right wing dictatorial regimes. The Second Vatican Council's decree Dignitatis humanae stated that religious freedom is a civil right that should be recognized in constitutional law.

Christianity emerged in the 1st century as one of many new religions in the Roman Empire. Early Christians were persecuted as early as 64 A. D. when Nero ordered large numbers of Christians executed in retaliation for the Great Fire of Rome. Christianity remained a growing minority religion in the empire for several centuries. Roman persecutions of Christians climaxed due to Emperor Diocletian till the turn of the 4th century. Following Constantine the Great's victory on Milvian Bridge, which he attributed to a Christian omen he saw in the sky, the Edict of Milan declared that the empire would no longer sanction persecution of Christians. Following Constantine's deathbed conversion in 337, all emperors adopted Christianity, except for Julian the Apostate who, during his brief reign, attempted unsuccessfully to re instate paganism. In the Christian era (more properly the era of the first seven Ecumenical Councils, 325–787) the Church came to accept that it was the emperor's duty to use secular power to enforce religious unity. Anyone within the Church who did not subscribe to Catholicism was seen as a threat to the dominance and purity of "the one true faith" and emperors saw it as their right to defend this faith by all means at their disposal. Beginning with Edward Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire some historians have taken the view that Christianity weakened the Roman Empire through its failure to preserve the pluralistic structure of the state. Pagans and Jews lost interest and the Church drew the most able men into its organisation to the detriment of the state.

The doctrine of the divine right of kings came to dominate mediaeval concepts of kingship, claiming biblical authority (Epistle to the Romans, chapter 13). Augustine of Hippo in his work The City of God had stated his opinion that while the City of Man and the City of God may stand at cross purposes, both of them have been instituted by God and served His ultimate will. Even though the City of Man – the world of secular government – may seem ungodly and be governed by sinners, it has been placed on earth for the protection of the City of God. Therefore, monarchs have been placed on their thrones for God's purpose, and to question their authority is to question God. It is worth mentioning that Augustine also said "a law that is not just, seems to be no law at all" and Thomas Aquinas indicated laws "opposed to the Divine good" must not be observed. This belief in the god given authority of monarchs was central to the Roman Catholic vision of governance in the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Ancien Régime. But this was most true of what would later be termed the ultramontaine party and the Catholic Church has recognized republics, on an exceptional basis, as early as 1291 in the case of San Marino. During early medieval times, a near monopoly of the Church in matters of education and of literary skills accounts for the presence of churchmen as their advisors. This tradition continued even as education became more widespread. Prominent examples of senior members of the church hierarchy who advised monarchs were Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in England, and Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin in France; prominent, devoutly Catholic laymen like Sir Thomas More also served as senior advisors to monarchs. Besides advising monarchs, the Church held direct power in mediaeval society as a landowner, a power broker, a policy maker, etc. Some of its bishops and archbishops were feudal lords in their own right, equivalent in rank and precedence to counts and dukes. Some were even sovereigns in their own right, while the Pope himself ruled the Papal States. Three archbishops played a prominent role in Holy Roman Empire as electors. As late as the early 18th century in the era of the Enlightenment, Jacques Benigne Bossuet, preacher to Louis XIV, defended the doctrine of the divine right of kings and absolute monarchy in his sermons. The Church was a model of hierarchy in a world of hierarchies, and saw the defense of that system as its own defense, and as a defense of what it believed to be a god ordained system. During the French Wars of Religion, the monarchomachs began to contest the divine right of kings, setting up the bases for the theory of popular sovereignty and theorizing the right of tyrannicides.

The central principle of the medieval, Renaissance, and ancien régime periods, monarchical rule "by God's will", was fundamentally challenged by the 1789 French Revolution. The revolution began as a conjunction of a need to fix French national finances and a rising middle class who resented the privileges of the clergy (in their role as the First Estate) and nobility (in their role as the Second Estate). The pent up frustrations caused by lack of political reform over a period of generations led the revolution to spiral in ways unimaginable only a few years earlier, and indeed unplanned and unanticipated by the initial wave of reformers. Almost from the start, the revolution was a direct threat to clerical and noble privilege: the legislation that abolished the feudal privileges of the Church and nobility dates from August 4, 1789, a mere three weeks after the fall of the Bastille (although it would be several years before this legislation came fully into effect). At the same time, the revolution also challenged the theological basis of royal authority. The doctrine of popular sovereignty directly challenged the former divine right of kings. The king was to govern on behalf of the people, and not under the orders of God. This philosophical difference over the basis of royal and state power was paralleled by the rise of a short lived democracy, but also by a change first from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy and finally to republicanism. Under the doctrine of the divine right of kings, only the Church or God could interfere with the right of a monarch to rule. Thus the attack on the French absolute monarchy was seen as an attack on God's anointed king. In addition, the Church's leadership came largely from the classes most threatened by the growing revolution. The upper clergy came from the same families as the upper nobility, and the Church was, in its own right, the largest landowner in France. The revolution was widely seen, both by its proponents and its opponents, as the fruition of the (profoundly secular) ideas of the Enlightenment. The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, voted by the National Constituent Assembly, seemed to some in the church to mark the appearance of the antichrist, in that they excluded Christian morality from the new "natural order". The fast moving nature of the revolution far outpaced Roman Catholicism's ability to adapt or come to any terms with the revolutionaries. In speaking of "the Church and the Revolution" it is important to keep in mind that neither the Church nor the Revolution were monolithic. There were class interests and differences of opinion inside the Church as well as out, with many of the lower clergy – and a few bishops, such as Talleyrand – among the key supporters of the early phases of the revolution. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which turned Church lands into state property and the clergy into employees of the state, created a bitter division within the church between those "jurors" who took the required oath of allegiance to the state (the abbé Grégoire or Pierre Daunou) and the "non jurors" who refused to do so. A majority of parish priests, but only four bishops, took the oath. As a large scale landowner tied closely to the doomed ancien regime, led by people from the aristocracy, and philosophically opposed to many of the fundamental principles of the revolution, the Church, like the absolute monarchy and the feudal nobility, was a target of the revolution even in the early phases, when leading revolutionaries such as Lafayette were still well disposed toward King Louis XVI as an individual. Instead of being able to influence the new political elite and so shape the public agenda, the Church found itself sidelined at best, detested at worst. As the revolution became more radical, the new state and its leaders set up its own rival deities and religion, a Cult of Reason and, later, a deistic cult of the Supreme Being, closing many Catholic churches, transforming cathedrals into "temples of reason", disbanding monasteries and often destroying their buildings (as at Cluny), and seizing their lands. In this process many hundreds of Catholic priests were killed, further polarising revolutionaries and the Church. The revolutionary leadership also devised a revolutionary calendar to displace the Christian months and the seven day week with its sabbath. Catholic reaction, in anti revolutionary risings such as the revolt in the Vendée, were often bloodily suppressed.

When Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in 1799, he began the process of coming back to terms with the Catholic Church. The Church was reestablished in power during the Bourbon Restoration, with the ultra royalists voting laws such as the Anti Sacrilege Act. The Church was then strongly counter revolutionary, opposing all changes made by the 1789 Revolution. The July Revolution of 1830 marked the end of any hope of a return to the ancien regime status of an absolute monarchy, by establishing a constitutional monarchy. The most reactionary aristocrats, in favor of an integral restoration of the Ancien Régime and known as Legitimists, began to retire from political life. However, Napoleon III's regime did support the Pope, helping to restore Pope Pius IX as ruler of the Papal States in 1849 after there had been a revolt there in 1848. Despite this official move, the process of secularization continued throughout the 20th century, culminating with the Jules Ferry laws in the 1880s and then with the 1905 law on separation of Church and state, which definitively established state secularism (known as laïcité). The Church itself remained associated with the Comte de Chambord, the Legitimist pretender to the throne. It was only under Pope Leo XIII (r: 1878–1903) that the Church leadership tried to move away from its anti Republican associations, when he ordered the deeply unhappy French Church to accept the Third French Republic (1875–1940) (Inter innumeras sollicitudines encyclical of 1892). However, his liberalising initiative was undone by Pope Pius X (r: 1903–1914), a traditionalist who had more sympathy for the French monarchists than for the Third Republic.

Following William of Orange's victories over King James II, by 1691 the supremacy of Protestantism was entrenched throughout the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. The economic and political power of Catholics, especially in Ireland, was severely curtailed. This was reinforced by the introduction of the Penal Laws. The practice of Catholicism (including the celebration of the Mass) was made illegal as Catholic priests celebrated the sacraments at risk of execution by law. However, towards the end of the eighteenth century a rapprochement began to develop between London and the Vatican. Britain's activities abroad and relations with Catholic countries were hampered by the tension that existed between it and the Church, and it was eager to persuade the Church to end its moral support for Irish separatism. Likewise, the Church was keen to send missionaries to the newly conquered colonies of the British Empire, especially Africa and India, and to ease the restrictions on its British and Irish adherents. Britain began to phase out the penal laws, and in 1795 it financed the building of St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, a seminary for the training of Catholic priests, in County Kildare. In return, the Church agreed to actively oppose Irish separatism, which it duly did in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. It continued this policy until the early 1900s, condemning each successive attempt by Irish republicanism to achieve independence from Britain through violence.

Over the course of the 19th century, Italian nationalism put increasing strain on the Pope's rule of the Papal States. Italian unification culminated in Garibaldi's capture of Rome in 1870, which ended the Catholic Church's temporal sovereignty and led Pope Pius IX to declare himself a prisoner in the Vatican. The conflict between the Italian state and the Papacy continued with the state's regulation of the Church and the Pope's voting and parliamentary boycott, and was finally resolved in 1929 by the Lateran Treaty between Mussolini and Pope Pius XI, confirming the Vatican City State and accepting the loss of the Papal States

Pope Leo XIII, responding to the rise of popular democracy, tried a new and somewhat more sophisticated approach to political questions than his predecessor Pius IX. On May 15, 1891, Leo issued the encyclical Rerum novarum (Latin: "About New Things"). This addressed the transformation of politics and society during the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. The document criticised capitalism, complaining of the exploitation of the masses in industry. However, it also sharply reproved the socialist concept of class struggle, and the proposed solution of eliminating private property. Leo called for strong governments to protect their citizens from exploitation, and urged Roman Catholics to apply principles of social justice in their own lives. This document was rightly seen as a profound change in the political thinking of the Holy See. It drew on the economic thought of St Thomas Aquinas, who taught that the "just price" in a marketplace should not be allowed to fluctuate due to temporary shortages or gluts. Seeking a principle to replace the threatening Marxist doctrine of class struggle, Rerum Novarum urged social solidarity between the upper and lower classes, and endorsed nationalism as a way of preserving traditional morality, customs, and folkways. In effect, Rerum Novarum proposed a kind of corporatism, the organisation of political power along industrial lines, similar to the mediaeval guild system. Under corporatism, the individual's place in society is determined by the ethnic, work, and social groups which one was born into or joined. Leo rejected one person, one vote democracy in favour of representation by interest groups. A strong government should serve as arbiter among the competing factions. Forty years later, the corporatist tendencies of Rerum Novarum were underscored by Pope Pius XI's May 25, 1931, encyclical Quadragesimo anno ("In the Fortieth Year"), which restated the hostility of Rerum Novarum to both unbridled competition and class struggle. The precepts of Leo and Pius were espoused by the Catholic social movement of Distributism, which later influenced the Fascist and Christian Democratic movements.

In the 20th century, the Catholic Church embraced a Christian Democratic outlook and promoted "free institutions, the welfare state, and political democracy". The encyclicals Au Milieu des Sollicitudes and Graves de communi re of Pope Leo XIII from the late 19th century established the Church's official commitment to both Catholic social teaching and Christian democracy, which promoted democracy as the best type of governance as long as it worked to the "benefit the lower classes of society", promoted common good and rejected individualism in favor of communitarianism, and opposed what Leo XIII called "individualistic liberal" capitalism. In that century, the Church's writings on democracy were "directly read, read and commented upon" by Christian politicians, inspiring Christian democratic parties and movements in Europe and South America. His successor, Pope Pius XII, also affirmed that "the church should advocate justice so that society can become more human, but not necessarily more formally Christian", therefore writing that the Church must accept secularism and works within the realms of it to improve and protect human rights. This led Roman Catholicism to be linked with Croat nationalism; as a result, "religious conviction and patriotic feelings were often inseparable in the minds of individual Croats", and the Nazi aligned Ustaše regime saw Catholicism as a potential tool to gain support of the local population and justify its genocide against Serbs. Immediately after coming to power, the new regime unleashed massacres and systematic genocide of the Serbian and Jewish population of Croatia, with almost 1 million Croat Serbs being massacred by the Ustaše and its allies. However, the relationship between the Church and the Spanish government quickly turned sour as the government enacted aggressive anti clerical policies, such as forcefully dissolving the Jesuits and nationalizing the Church's possessions. The anti clerical policies were condemned by the clergy, and were "wildly unpopular in all but the most anticlerical circles". Many Catholic priests came to the defense of the Republic Maximiliano Arboleya urged for peace and asked Spanish Catholics to remain loyal to the Republican regime, José Manuel Gallegos Rocafull stressed the need to preserve Spanish democracy and pressured the Republican government to police anti clerical socialist militias, and many respected Catholic personalities spoke in favour of the Second Republic as well, such as Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo and José Bergamín. According to Spanish historian Antonio Fernández Garcia, the greater part of the organized Church did not willingly cooperate with the Franco forces during the war. On 14 September 1936, the issue of the civil war was addressed by the Vatican for the first time Pope Pius XI made a speech in which he condemned communism as well as the horrors of war. The Pope condemned the part of the clergy that tried to justify the war, ordering them to "alleviate the suffering of the war" instead. According to Benjamin DeLeo, "the Pope said the exact opposite of what the Nationalists in the crowd wanted to hear", and the apparent lack of support by the Catholic Church dismayed the Nationalist forces. After the end of the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Catholic Church was severely devastated; over a half of Spanish parishes had their churches burned or their priests murdered. In Catalonia, over one third of Catholic priest had been murdered. Andrew Dowling wrote that by 1939, the "religious life was almost eradicated" in Catalonia. Most of religious events had to take place outside or in schools because of lack of religious building, while in some parts of Spain religious presence became non existent. It was in this atmosphere that the Church signed a Concordat with the new regime in 1953, although Vatican was reluctant to do so and forced significant concessions from the regime. The Concordat was seen as an opportunity to avoid further anti clerical violence or persecution, and was also influenced by the pro Franco policy of the United States under President Eisenhower. In Catalonia, the church used its position to foster Catalan nationalism while publishing in Catalan language was illegal under the Francoist regime, the Church was exempt from this ban thanks to the Concordat, which meant that "the only way that Catalanism could be expressed would be through the Church." According to Rooney, "members of clergy were to play a leading role in the opposition to the dictatorship"; this was particularly true for the Catholic clergy in "Basque Country and Catalonia, where the clergy were actively involved in regional nationalism, and also for those priests from Catholic worker organisations who took up the defence of striking workers". This led Maurice Thorez of the French Communist Party to offer "an outstretched hand" to French Catholics in 1936, wishing "to achieve a tactical alliance to head off fascism in France and Europe and to promote social progress". The Church gained a reputation of a nationalist and anti British force in late 19th and early 20th century, as it clashed with the British government and advanced Irish causes. Establishing its identity as a persecuted church that stood opposed to the British presence in Ireland, Catholicism became a source of the Irish identity. Despite the fact that the Church was "overwhelmingly dominant" in 20th century Ireland, the Irish Constitution of 1922 was of secular character and followed the ideals of the separation between church and state, and was supported by the Irish clergy. The clergy as well as Catholic nationalist circles and newspapers such as the Catholic Bulletin focused on what they considered "the absence of a spirit of Gaelicism or an active sense of nationality", condemning English language literature as a sign of Ireland being "shackled by an alien tongue", However, with the advent of secularism following the end of WW2, both the Church as well as the Irish society itself underwent changes and tilted in liberal direction. Starting in the 1960s, the Catholic Church would rapidly lose its influence on the Irish society unlike in 1937, the government no longer sought the advice of the clergy on political matters, and even came close to openly defying the Church; while anti Catholicism amongst the Protestant minorities had mostly faded away by 1960s, it was now replaced by anti clericalism of liberal groups and movements. However, the Church itself also liberalised thanks to Vatican II the Church accepted the increasing secularization of the Irish society, and in 1959 Father Peter Connelly wrote: " the Church ought not compromise her moral authority with the compulsions of civil law nor ought the State intrude into the private moral life unless ‘‘public morality’’ or ‘‘the public order’’ is being menaced. Civil law does not deal formally with sin." Emilio Gentile highlights that Pizzardo was considered highly conservative, which shows hostile attitude towards fascism even among the reactionary circles of the Catholic clergy. According to Gentile, Catholic anti fascists considered fascism was considered a political religion that inherently competeted with the Catholic Church for social influence; Igino Giordani called fascism a modern version of Caesaropapism that wishes to subjugate the Church, while Luigi Sturzo argued that fascism is fundamentally incompatible with Catholicism because instead of promoting Catholic values and Catholic state, "fascism wants to be worshipped for itself, and wishes to create a Fascist state." Philip Morgan of the University of Hull writes that Catholics were considered enemies by Italian fascists, with Roberto Farinacci identifying "the leaders and members of Catholic organisations" as key opponents of the fascist regime. Adrian Lyttelton argues that fascism itself was anti clerical Benito Mussolini himself was an atheist "distinguished by his hatred of the Church", who often attacked the Vatican as well as Catholics themselves; many Italian fascists called for the "de Vaticanization" of Italy, and the Fascist Manifesto itself was anti Catholic as well. According to Lyttelton, "the typical Fascist enthusiast ranked the priest only a short way after the Socialist agitator in his list of enemies". In 1929, the Church banned books of a fascist journalist Mario Missiroli who advocated for a "conciliation" between Catholicism and Mussolini's fascist state, and in 1934 the works of Giovanni Gentile were banned as well. Particularly offensive to Mussolini was the ban of the books of Alfredo Oriani, whom he considered "a favourite author of the regime". Fascist press attacked the Catholic Church as well, denouncing it as an institution of anti fascism and accusing it of interfering in state affairs. In 1932, The Doctrine of Fascism written by Giovanni Gentile and Mussolini also described fascism as "educating to a spiritual life and promoting it", which was condemned by the Pope as anti Christian and seeking to replace Catholicism. Other members of the clergy such as the Cardinal Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster, also attacked fascism, with Schuster describing it as a "philosophical religious system" and "Hegelian statolatry".

The relationship between fascist Italy and the Catholic Church can be divided into three periods prior to the March on Rome, the Church was hostile to the fascist movement and was openly denounced by the clergy as well as Catholic organisations. to which the Church was strongly opposed. Following the implementation of the racial laws, fascist informers remarked that "the clergy and the practising Catholics make clear that they deplore, as persecution, the measures aimed at the Jews". The Church refused to recognise the Italian Social Republic in 1943, and used its privileged status to give shelter to anti fascist activists. The Catholic Church became a centre of clandestine anti fascist resistance in Italy during World War II, which allowed Christian Democrats to emerge as the strongest force in the resistance as well as post WW2 Italian politics. Adrian Lyttelton argues that "the single most important national institution to make the transition from Fascism to democracy was the Catholic Church", while Richard A. Webster notes that "in conditions of ever tighter totalitarian control, the Church was one of the few institutions in Italy that Fascism never penetrated". During the unstable period in Italy called Biennio Rosso, marked by strikes, protests and clashes between socialist groups and fascist Blackshirts, the Church was strongly critical of Italian fascists, and Catholic media such as the newspaper La Civiltà Cattolica referred to fascism as an evil and anti Christian movement. As such, Catholics in the 1920s Italy were left wing, largely immune to Blackshirt agitation and were ready to enter "workers' unity" alliances with socialist trade unions for the sake of anti fascism. Local Catholic socialist leaders emerged, such as Romano Cocchi at Bergamo and Giuseppe Speranzini in Verona. The presence of such "Left Catholics" was strong, and a strike organised by left Catholic unions in Verona gathered 150,000 'white' workers. Ultimately, no lasting alliance between the 'red' socialist and 'white' Catholic organisations was successful as both sides remained largely unwilling to cooperate despite their anti fascist outlook. Socialist unions would often refuse to participate in strikes organised by white leagues, allowing local landowners to use the Socialist Catholic split to their advantage and isolate trade unions from each other. Catholic newspapers such as L'Italia criticised 'red' unions for their neutrality, writing in 1919 that there was a "tight link between our red adversaries and the ruling class".

The division of Germans between Catholicism and Protestantism has figured into German politics since the Protestant Reformation. The Kulturkampf that followed German unification was the defining dispute between the German state and Catholicism. In Weimar Germany, the Centre Party was the Catholic political party. It disbanded around the time of the signing of the Reichskonkordat (1933), the treaty that continues to regulate church state relations to this day. Pius XI's encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (1937) protested what it perceived to be violations of the Reichskonkordat. The role of Catholic bishops in Nazi Germany remains a controversial aspect of the study of Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust. According to Robert A. Krieg, "Catholic bishops, priests, and lay leaders had criticized National Socialism since its inception in the early 1920s", while The Sewanee Review remarked in 1934 that even "when the Hitler movement was still small and apparently insignificant, German Catholic ecclesiastics recognized its inherent threat to certain beliefs and principles of their Church". Catholic sermons and newspapers vigorously denounced Nazism and accused it of espousing neopaganism, and Catholic priests forbade believers from joining the NSDAP. Waldemar Gurian noted that the upper Catholic bishops issued several condemnations of the NSDAP starting in 1930 and 1931, and describing the relations between the National Socialism and the Catholic Church, concluded that "though there has been no legal declaration of war, a war is nevertheless going on." The encyclical forcefully condemned the Nazi regime as well as its policies, especially anti Semitic laws as well as numerous breaches of the Reichskonkordat. The encyclical stated that National Socialism is incompatible with both Catholic faith and Catholic ethics, and called upon Catholics to stand against the "so called myth of blood and race" espoused by Nazism. Frank J. Coppa considers Mit Brennender Sorge a "forceful and dramatic condemnation of Nazi policy". As a result of aggressive stance that the Vatican took against National Socialism, Catholic clergy in Germany opposed the regime, and Catholic churches were often meeting places for the anti Nazi resistance. In January 1939, Martin Bormann stated that the majority of Catholic clergy "stand in concealed or open opposition to National Socialism and the State led by it." An annual report by the Reich Security Main Office in 1938 criticised the Catholic Church for not only expressing clear hostility towards the Nazi regime, but also accused German Catholics of "trying to bring about the collapse of the Third Reich". Reinhard Heydrich considered Catholicism a fierce opponent of National Socialism, citing "the hostility constantly displayed by the Vatican, the negative attitude of the bishops towards the Anschluss as typified by the conduct of Bishop Sproll of Württemberg, the attempt to make the Catholic Eucharistic Congress in Budapest a demonstration of united opposition to Germany, and the continued accusations of Godlessness and of destruction of church life made by Church leaders in their pastoral letters."

During World War II, Jozef Tiso, a Roman Catholic monsigneur, became the Nazi quisling in Slovakia. Tiso was head of state and the security forces, as well as the leader of the paramilitary Hlinka Guard, which wore the Catholic Episcopal cross on its armbands. Slovak nationalists considered Slovakia to be an inherently Catholic nation, and Catholicism was seen as a fundamental part of Slovak identity; to this end, the Catholic clergy was highly active in both social and political scene of the Slovak nation approximately 80% of Slovaks were members of the Catholic Church during World War II. Slovak government was divided between the clerical fascist wing of Jozef Tiso, and the pro German National Socialist wing led by Vojtech Tuka. The Slovak government had a high proportion of Roman Catholic priests as well as religious Catholics; however, Richard J. Wolff argues that this was the result of prominent position of the Catholic Church in the national life of Slovakia, and such situation "may have arisen in a truly democratic state as well". The Slovak People's Party that ruled the First Slovak Republic was founded by a Catholic priest Andrej Hlinka; the party was authoritarian and nationalist, and included elements of Catholic social doctrines as an element of its ideology, along with a Catholic narrative. Although the party used religious imagery, it was unable to gain a Catholic following because of the strong German influence on the regime. As the persecution of the Catholic Church in Germany, Austria and Poland became apparent, the Church in Slovakia was seen as an opponent to influence of Nazi Germany. Despite its Catholic and clerical nature, the Vatican was critical of the Slovak regime Pope Pius XI discouraged clerical participation and support of the regime, and monsignor Domenico Tardini informed Tiso that "the Holy See does not look with pleasure" upon his appointment as the president of Slovakia. Wolff notes that "The Vatican consistently demonstrated its uneasiness as Catholic Slovakia drew further into the German web", and the Catholic hierarchy constantly clashed with Tiso and his government over its pro German and fascist policies. The Church was concerned with "Nazi advances" that were implemented by the regime, and also sought to preserve its profound social influence. According to Wolff, "the ultimate test of strength between the Church and nazism in Slovakia centered upon the struggle over the fate of the country's Jewish population." From 1884 to 1914, Belgium was ruled by a pro clerical Catholic Party, with the Church enjoying both profound support and influence on Belgian politics. As Catholics were not alienated by political liberalism, the Catholic Party fully respected the liberal constitution of 1830, and despite its very strong influence, the Catholic hierarchy respected the division between religious and political matters. However, despite liberal leanings of Belgian Catholicism, ultramontanism and conservatism also became widespread within the Flemish movement, which emerged as a response to the domination of French speaking elite in Belgian politics. The Flemish movement demanded equal rights for Dutch language and advocated for Flemish independence while also incorporating anti liberalism. The Flemish movement grew dominant following the First World War, particularly in response to rising socialism and anti clericalism. In Wallonia, radicalized French speaking Catholic conservatives and veterans started founding fascist and far right parties and organisations, with a far right Rexist Party emerging in 1935. Blanshard accused the Catholic Church hierarchy of having an undue influence on legislation, education and medical practice. Years later, John F. Kennedy, spoke to a convention of Baptist pastors in Louisiana during his election campaign. He assured them that, if elected, he would put his country before his religion. Since the late 1960s, the Catholic Church has been politically active in the U. S. around the "life issues" of abortion, assisted suicide and euthanasia, with some bishops and priests refusing communion to Catholic politicians who publicly advocate for legal abortion. This has created a stigma within the Church itself however. The church has also played significant roles in the fights over capital punishment, gay marriage, welfare, state secularism, various "peace and justice" issues, among many others. Its role varies from area to area depending upon the size of the Catholic Church in a particular region and on the region's predominant ideology. For example, a Catholic church in the Southern U. S. would be more likely to be against universal health care than a Catholic church in New England. Robert Drinan, a Catholic priest, served five terms in Congress as a Democrat from Massachusetts before the Holy See forced him to choose between giving up his seat in Congress or being laicized. The 1983 Code of Canon Law forbids Catholic priests from holding political office anywhere in the world.

Secularism was enforced in Argentina in 1884 when President Julio Argentino Roca passed Law 1420 on secular education. In 1955, the Catholics nationalists overthrew General Perón in the "Revolución Libertadora", and a concordat was signed in 1966. Catholic nationalists continued to play an important role in the politics of Argentina, while the Church itself was accused of having set up ratlines to organize the escape of former Nazis after WWII. Furthermore, several important Catholic figures have been accused of having supported the "Dirty War" in the 1970s, including Pope Francis, then Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Antonio Caggiano, Archbishop of Buenos Aires from 1959 to 1975, was close to the fundamentalist Cité catholique organisation, and introduced Jean Ousset (former personal secretary of Charles Maurras, the leader of the Action française)'s theories on counter revolutionary warfare and "subversion" in Argentina.

Traditionally, Catholics in Australia had been predominantly of Irish descent and working class. This was noticeable in civic society and politics, where the increasingly urban Irish Catholic population played a disproportionate role in the labour movement, including the foundation of the Australian Labor Party, and were in direct political opposition to the disproportionate role in business played by Anglicans and Presbyterians who were typically involved in conservative politics. This tendency was sustained until the 1950s for most Catholics to vote Labor and for most Anglicans, Presbyterians and Methodists to vote for their conservative opponents. This divide became starkly and bitterly apparent during the First World War: Anglo Saxon Protestants were reflexively enthusiastic supporters of the war and conscription, in line with the establishment culture of loyalism; conversely, Irish and Scottish Catholics were reflexively critical of both. When the Australian government tried to introduce conscription it was defeated, on two occasions by referendum. Prominent Irish Catholic campaigners against the war and conscription such as Archbishop Daniel Mannix were widely denounced in public as traitors by Protestants. But Catholic attitudes toward communism have evolved and Pope Francis has taken the focus off ideologies and placed it on the sufferings of people under both systems, with the hope filled conclusion.