Review of Udi Greenberg, The End of Schism: Catholics, Protestants, and the Remaking of European Christian Life, 1880s-1970s (Harvard University Press, 2025)
The Dartmouth historian Udi Greenberg has taken on an important and ambitious topic: the evolution of Protestant-Catholic relations in continental Western Europe from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s. Few would deny that relations between the two confessions improved markedly over this period. Whether this progress amounts to anything like an “end of the schism,” however, is another matter entirely. This questionable thesis—combined with some analytic shortcomings and several factual errors—ultimately weakens Greenberg’s book. But before turning to those criticisms, however, one should recognize what the book does well.
Greenberg has done genuinely impressive research, mining many often-obscure French- and German-language sources seldom consulted by Anglo-American scholars. In a word, he has done his homework—and in multiple languages. Anyone interested in the religious life and theology of this era—particularly in matters of socioeconomic theory, sexual ethics and family life, and overseas missions in their late colonial and postcolonial contexts—will profit from his extensive endnotes, which are arguably the most valuable part of the book.
The narrative itself covers a lot of ground. Chapter one of The End of the Schism treats the nineteenth century as a “second confessional age,” taking its cue from the influential thesis of the German historian Olaf Blaschke. Chapter two turns to the period from the 1880s to the 1930s, when Catholics and Protestants, the author claims, shared “a series of overlapping concerns about life in the modern world,” including the perceived threats of socialism, feminist and sex-reform movements, and the challenges of overseas missions. Chapter three examines ecumenical stirrings as both of the confessions confronted Bolshevism and Nazism—though, regrettably, many Christian leaders cozied up to the latter, viewing it as the lesser of two evils and sometimes even welcoming it. Chapter four surveys the postwar era, showing Catholics and Protestants jointly supporting social democracy even as they grappled with feminism, cultural upheaval, and decolonization. Greenberg’s discussion of the midcentury ecumenical consensus around social democracy is especially strong. The final chapter treats the 1960s and ’70s, when many Catholics and Protestants embraced the progressive causes of the New Left—what Greenberg terms a “radical and progressive ecumenism.”
But enough summary. The book’s weaknesses are glaring, and they raise the question of whether Harvard University Press—usually a reputable publisher—served the author well in the peer-review process.
To begin with, while Catholicism may plausibly be treated as a relatively unified phenomenon, “Protestantism” certainly cannot. Using the term as an undifferentiated category throughout is misleading. What Greenberg usually means is mainline Protestantism—churches aligned with the ecumenical movement and the World Council of Churches. A more robust acknowledgment of Protestant heterogeneity would have complicated, but also enriched, his argument and worked against several sweeping generalizations.
The remainder of this review you can find here in Commonweal magazine where it first appeared.
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