Complex sentence: Strongly conservative and traditionalist, he opposed democratic and modernising reforms in the Papal States and throughout Europe, seeing them as fronts for revolutionary leftism, and he sought to strengthen the religious and political authority of the papacy (see ultramontanism).
Split into simpler sentences: Strongly conservative and traditionalist, he opposed democratic and modernising reforms in the Papal States and throughout Europe, seeing them as fronts for revolutionary leftism. Against these trends he sought to strengthen the religious and political authority of the papacy (see ultramontanism).