From “Defending Democracy from its Christian Enemies” by David P. Gushee
Overall, though there were notable modernists and various kinds of dissenters to reactionary French Catholicism, in the period we are considering the French catholic Church positioned itself as a conservative partisan in the left/right culture wars rather than being able to rise above them with a more inclusive vision.
Incidentally, this was one reason for the broader failures of the Vatican during the rise of fascism in Europe. Right-wing movements promised familiar conservative religious, social, and cultural goals, including the defeat of socialism, Communism, liberalism, internationalism, individualism, materialism, and the excesses of democracy. These goals were quite appealing to conservative Catholic officials, who echoed them in Vatican documents. The most famous of these was Pope Pius IX’s not famous 1864 “Syllabus of Errors,” which offered a litany of antiliberal complaints.