Modern

The modern era in this archive runs from the Enlightenment through the end of the Second World War. The relationship between the institutional Christian church and state authority shifts decisively in this period: religious establishment falls away in most Western jurisdictions, and the church becomes one institution among many in newly secular legal orders.

The documentary record is comparatively rich. Court archives, parliamentary inquiries, press records, and the church's own internal correspondence are all available and indexed. The principal twentieth-century institutional-abuse complexes — Catholic and Anglican residential schools in the British settler colonies, the Magdalene laundry system, the early decades of the modern Catholic clergy-abuse cover-up — all originate in this era, even where they are most fully documented in the contemporary period that follows.