This final volume in the "Penguin History of the Church" series covers the myriad institutions of organized Christianity since the early 1900s and their developing relationships with the modern state - from the survival of the Church in communist Poland to the decline of the mainstream churches in Western Europe.;The book also looks at the paradoxes and difficulties of the modern Church in this century, its continuing strength in Latin America, the Catholic Church's uneasy compact with fascism between the wars, and the thriving of variable Christian sects in contemporary North America.