Faith + Reason = Truth

Through the crowd you can shove and jostle just enough to get a clear line of sight.
Just in time, it turns out, as the heavy, angled metal blade rides straight down its wooden frame, abruptly ending its short journey as the head of someone offensive to the Revolution is instantly and cleanly separated from the body that once carried it.

Connect this to conservatism and the Catholic Church if you can; if not, allow me to do it for you.

The Church had been a huge supporter of the Enlightenment, of the new democratic governments resulting from the American and French Revolutions, and especially of the potential that these governments possessed to check rabid European nationalism and powerful central heads of state.  These monarchs and dictators were threatening the very existence of the Papacy and even of the Church itself, as they salivated at the Church's vast property holdings and wealth.  The Popes, eager to alter the landscape, were overjoyed with the developments in France, as the French kings had attempted to literally own the Papacy through the forced extension of its time outside of Rome and in Avignon.  So what happened next?

Change happened.  Radical, hyperfast change happened in France, and was threatening to spread throughout Europe.  The papacy had been the Rock of Christianity since it was deemed as such by Jesus when he called Peter the rock on which the Church would be built.  Slow-moving, never-changing, stable, conservative papal leadership had been the one constant connection from the Pax Romana to the present.  But it was now marginalized by the leaders of the new nations of Europe - or at least it HAD been, until things got entirely out of hand in the French Revolution.

Anarchy would have been the next logical step, but instead, a young military commander named Napoleon took the reigns and restored stability.  Lo and behold, the Church and the Pope started being viewed in a different light:  tradition, conservativism, and lack of change suddenly looked rather appealing to not just the leaders of Europe, but to the people themselves.  People who had feared their situations spinning entirely out of their control within a relative blink of an eye.  Even the popes themselves began to reconnect with the tradition and purpose of the Rock and act accordingly.

The question must be asked:  how bad ARE things?  Change can be good, in small doses with a reasonably certain outcome of something better than before.  But wholesale change for change's sake may not be necessary or even advisable unless the situation is so desperately untenable and threatening that to continue on the same course would be catastrophic.  Otherwise, the way we've always done it (status quo with minor yet constant improvements) will probably suffice, even though it will always be unpopular to do something other than embrace "change" with blissfully ignorant open arms.