The Round Table will present the often marginalized or even ignored religious aspects of revolutions both as a movens and as a consequence of revolutionary motions and discuss, from a transnational and an interdisciplinary perspective, how the Holy See in the course of the last two centuries responded to the challenges of revolutionary violence, almost always accompanied by a direct or indirect anti-Catholic offensive, and to profound changes of political and social order that influenced the position of Catholicism in the public sphere and caused profound secularisation shifts. Particular attention will be paid to the upcoming liberalism, the different “kulturkampf” situations and the “Eastern Question” in the 19th century and to the analysis of how the Holy See and her diplomacy delt with the bloody revolutionary offensives against Catholicism in Spain and Mexico in the interwar period and with the establishment of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe after 1945 and the persecution of the Church behind the Iron Curtain, both of which, in spite of local differences and different development phases, followed the declared goal to destroy the Catholic Church.