Americanism was, in the years around 1900, a political and religious outlook attributed to some American Catholics and denounced as heresies by the Holy See. In the 1890s, European "continental conservative" clerics detected signs of modernism or classical liberalism, which Pope Pius IX had condemned in the Syllabus of Errors in 1864, among the beliefs and teachings of many members of the American Catholic hierarchy, who denied the charges. Pope Leo XIII wrote against these ideas in a letter to Cardinal James Gibbons, published as . The Pope lamented for America where church and state are "dissevered and divorced" and wrote of his preference for a closer relationship between the Catholic Church and the State along European lines. The long-term result was that the Irish Catholics who largely controlled the Catholic Church in the United States increasingly demonstrated total loyalty to the Pope, and suppressed traces of liberal thought in the Catholic colleges. At bottom, the conflict was cultural, as the continental conservative Europeans, angered at the heavy attacks on the Catholic Church in Germany, France and other countries, moved to stamp out the individualist attitude in America. In Europe During the French Third Republic, which began in 1870, the power and influence of French Catholicism steadily declined. The French government passed laws bearing more and more stringently on the Church, and the majority of French citizens did not object. Indeed, they began to look toward legislators and not to the clergy for guidance. Observing this, and encouraged by the action of Pope Leo XIII, who, in 1892 called on French Catholics loyally to accept the Republic, several young French priests set themselves to stop the decline in Church power. They determined that because the Church was predominantly sympathetic to the monarchists and hostile to the Republic, and because it held itself aloof from modern philosophies and practices, people had turned away from it. The progressive priests believed that the Church did too little to cultivate individual character, and put too much emphasis on the routine side of religious observance. They also noted that Catholicism was not making much use of modern means of propaganda, such as social movements, the organization of clubs, or the establishing of settlements. In short, the Church had not adapted to modern needs, and these priests endeavored to correct this. They began a domestic apostolate which had for one of its rallying cries, ("Let us