[Review] Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church
“Christianity rests entirely on the pope so that the principles of political and social order over which he has been called by divine providence to preside may be derived from the following chain of reasoning: there can be no European religion without Christianity; there can be no Christianity without Catholicism; there can be no Catholicism without the pope; there can be no pope without the sovereignty that belongs to him”
- Joseph de Maistre, in a letter to Count Pierre Louis de Blacas, 1814 (O’Malley 64-65)
Recently, in the span of about a week, I read through John W. O'Malley's short book on Vatican I entitled Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church. It was not a difficult read by any means, but I definitely came away from it feeling like I gained a much broader understanding of the ecumenical council and the political, cultural and ecclesiastical circumstances that were prevailing during and around the time of the Council. The book is by no means a hit-piece, nor is it a form of hagiography for the Council or Pope Pius IX.
What I enjoyed most about O'Malley's work is the time he spends in contextualizing the Council in its place and time. Long before even the French Revolution, the nature of papal authority was somewhat contested, usually by ecclesiologies which attempted to bolster the authority of the bishops or the national church against that of the pope in Rome, the most well-known of these tendencies in France being known as Gallicanism, though it had a parallel in Germany known as Febronianism, and another in Austria-Hungary known as Josephinism.
Though Febronianism and Josephinism are important in their own right, I will focus on Gallicanism in my review. Gallicanism, properly speaking, originated in March 1682 with the Declaration of the Gallican Clergy, also known as the Gallican Articles. It would be a mistake though to say that the Articles came out of thin air though, as even in the writings of Doctor of the Church St. Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621) we can read him combating the opinions of "Parisians" such as Jean Gerson (1363-1429). Even then, though, notably Bellarmine did not go as far as to call these Parisians heretics. Indeed, as O'Malley himself quotes in regards to Bellarmine, "Although [he] believed the Parisian [Gallican] position was erroneous and close to heresy, he did not dare call it a heresy because, as he wrote, it was tolerated by the Holy See" (O'Malley 63)
The Articles of 1682 were issued as a result of a dispute between French king Louis XIV and Pope Innocent XI. There were four articles in the Declaration, all of which are very important to Vatican I. The first article says that Christ bestowed on St. Peter and his successors authority over spiritual matters, but not temporal matters. Thus we see an assertion of the rights of kings to manage their kingdoms against perceived papal interference. The second article is an assertion of Conciliarism, the idea that an ecumenical council is superior to the pope in authority, which was declared at the Council of Constance in the decree Haec Sancta (1415). Simultaneously, however, this article indeed affirmed that the Holy See possessed full authority. The third article affirmed a support of "the liberties of the French church", a common refrain in Gallican thought. The fourth article, however, is most directly relevant to Vatican I and its context, however, reading "In questions of faith the leading role is that of the Supreme Pontiff, and his decrees apply to all churches in general and to each of them in particular. But his judgment is not unchangeable unless it receives the consent of the church" (O'Malley 27) (In fidei quoque quaestionibus praecipuas Summi Pontificis esse partes, eiusque decreta ad omnes et singulas ecclesias pertinere, nec tamen irreformabile esse iudicium nisi Ecclesiae consensus accesserit). It was this article that Vatican I would overthrow in the fourth chapter of Pastor Aeternus with the declaration that:
Therefore, faithfully adhering to the tradition received from the beginning of the christian faith, to the glory of God our savior, for the exaltation of the Catholic religion and for the salvation of the christian people, with the approval of the Sacred Council, we teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman Pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the Church, irreformable (ideoque eiusmodi Romani Pontificis definitiones ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae irreformabiles esse.)
To jump to another book by Richard F. Costigan, SJ, entitled The Consensus of the Church and Papal Infallibility: A Study in the Background of Vatican I for a moment, it is interesting to see the reaction of Innocent XI and the curia to the Gallican Articles. Obviously, they were extremely displeased, but according to Costigan, "Innocent was not minded to act precipitately, and after some consideration he appointed a special commission to study the French declaration. This commission studied and debated the matter for years, and indeed were still debating it when Innocent XI died on August 12, 1689" (Costigan 20) Though some on the commission such as Cardinal Decio Azzolini were in favor of meting out outright condemnation of the Articles, saying that these were "propositions so impious, so detestable, so temerarious and schismatic that no ecclesiastic could sustain them without infamy in this world and reprobation in the next" (ibid.). This was a minority view, and the majority believed that these matters could not be properly condemned as heretical at that time. Costigan reports how Innocent XI himself noted in a letter to Cardinal d'Estrées as early as May 1682 that "These matters have been disputed and can still be [disputed]" (ibid.) Though, following this, Pope Alexander VIII condemned the Gallican Articles in 1691 with his bull Inter Multiplices, declaring the declaration to be null and void, not much more was done at the time, practically speaking.
I dwelt on this for a moment to illustrate that declarations of Vatican I were very much not absolutely settled doctrine before the fateful Council under Pius IX. Following the Gallican Articles of 1682 and the subsequent reactions from Rome, the following centuries would see more attempts by governments and regional episcopates to beat back the power of the papacy, particularly in Austria-Hungary and Germany. The extent of these movements against centralizing papalism may be seen in examples such as the suppression of the papalist Jesuit Order in several countries. Jesuits were expelled from Portugal and Portugal's overseas domains in 1759, from France in 1764, and from Spain and its overseas territories along with the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1767, putting pressure on the papacy until in 1773 the Order was suppressed by Clement XIV.
The high-water mark of this trend came with the Jansenism and Enlightenment-influenced Synod of Pistoia in Tuscany under Scipione de' Ricci in 1786. This synod in particular was certainly uncomfortably close to the Papal States which were right next door. The synod exalted the authority of civil power, based authority of the church on the consent of the faithful, and the authority of the bishops on the consent of their clergy, along with various reforms typical of Jansenist piety, such as condemnations of the Sacred Heart, etc (O'Malley 31). Pope Pius VI would condemn eighty-five of the synod's provisions in 1794 in the bull Auctorem Fidei.
Around this time, however, was the outbreak of the French Revolution. With the Civil Constitution of the Clergy passed in 1790, the number of dioceses in France was cut down from 135 to 83. Bishops and priests would be elected at a local level, and papal approval of episcopal nominations were abolished. Bishops were required to swear loyalty to the state and accept the Civil Constitution, which, in the end, more than half of them did. Pius VI responded by issuing Quod Aliquantum, strongly denouncing the actions of the Revolution as an act of war against the Catholic Church. The next month he excommunicated all priests who took the oath, and annulled the appointment of bishops made without papal approval. The Revolution rolled on ahead, introducing a non-Christian revolutionary calendar, and transforming Notre Dame into a "Temple of Reason". Thousands of Catholics were murdered by the state, and the property of the French church was seized, leaving it destitute.
By 1796, French troops under Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Italy and occupied the Papal States. Rome was occupied by the next year, and Pius VI was declared deposed as ruler of the Papal States and was taken to France as a prisoner, dying soon after. His death was recorded in town records as simply "Citizen Braschi. Occupation pontiff". As O'Malley notes "The humiliation of the papacy was complete. Its end, long predicted, had finally arrived" (43).
This was not to be, of course. Not long after, Pius VII was elected, and was able to return to Rome as the French were forced to withdraw. Pius VII would work out a Concordat with Napoleon in 1801. Despite this, the Organic Articles were published the next year, which mandated the teaching of the Gallican Articles in all French seminaries. Despite the protests of the pope, it was of no avail.
I dwell so long on all of this to really nail home what O'Malley covers before even going into the thick of the debates and immediate context of Vatican I. It is my thought that the Council can simply not be understood without this context of Gallicanism, Febronianism, Jansenism, the Enlightenment and the Revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries. It is in this environment that 'Ultramontanism' as a movement would really begin to assert itself against the state and modern society. The idea of papal infallibility, which of course was not per se 'new' (it can be seen in the writings of St. Robert Bellarmine and St. Francis de Sales centuries before Vatican I, for example), came to be touted as a defense against oppressive governments and national churches. By bolstering the authority and primacy of the pope, the Church would stand independent and free against the modern world, which, looking at how things went down in France during the Revolution with the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, it is not hard to see how this notion would have a great deal of plausibility. Thus, with the emergence of figures such as Count Joseph Marie de Maistre (1753-1821), author of Du Pape, and with works such as Mauro Cappellari (the future Pope Gregory XVI)'s work Il Trionfo della Santa Sede e della Chiesa contro gli assalti dei novatori in 1799, infallibility began to move back into the center stage as a panacea for the ills of modernity.
One thing I do think that O'Malley does well with in his book is pointing out the influence of journalism in the prelude to Vatican I. "The journals were the major instrument for the great transformation of social conscious that took place within the church from the midcentury onward." (83) In this sense, with the influence of the press, Vatican I was a very modern council. Figures such as Louis Veuillot (1813-1883), who became editor of the journal L'Univers in 1848, were tireless promoters of Ultramontane thought, oftentimes to very exaggerated degrees. One thing that really took me aback during reading about Veuillot - a man who had Pius IX's ear - was the almost blasphemous ways he could refer to the pope. In a paraphrase of the sequence for Mass on the Feast of Pentecost, "Veni Sancte Spiritus" (Come, Holy Spirit), for instance, he substituted Pius IX for the Holy Spirit (87):
To Pius IX, Pontiff King Veni, Sancte Spiritus
Father of the poor, Veni, pater pauperum
Giver of gifts, Veni, dator munerum
Light of hearts, O lux beatissima
Send forth they beam Reple cordis intima
Of heavenly light! Tuorum fidelium
The exaggerated Ultramonatism of figures like Veuillot was not unique, however. O'Malley gives examples such as William George Ward, who "became the loudest voice for infallibility in the English-speaking world, especially after he assumed editorship of the Dublin Review in 1863 (published in London)" (81), who was famous for expressing a desire for an infallible papal bull at breakfast every morning with the Times. Another English convert to Catholicism was Archbishop Henry Edward Manning, who can also be counted as a central figure in the triumph of the doctrine at Vatican I. According to O'Malley "[E]ven after the council he maintained that infallibility extended to "truths of science, truths of history, dogmatic facts [for example, canonizations], and minor censures" (ibid.) Thankfully, needless to say, none of these exaggerated forms of papalism ever won out in the final decree of chapter four in Pastor Aeternus.
It was also fascinating for me to read about Prosper Louis Pascal Guéranger (1805-1875) and his connections with the Romanization of the French church during the 19th century. Guéranger himself was an Ultramontantist, and a re-founded the Abbey of Solesmes in 1833. He was also a great writer on liturgical matters, which cannot be understood apart from his devotion to Rome and Roman ways. In the first volume of his Institutions liturgiques published in 1840, he criticized the liturgies of the French church for various reasons, including the use of secularizing or classicalizing music, devotions to cults of local saints and miracles, etc. According to Guéranger this failed to show the unity of the Church. Critics responded harshly to this work at first, seeing it as an attack on the French episcopate and the traditions and liberties of the French church. The diocesan rearrangements of the French Revolution had led to some liturgical chaos as well, given that in one diocese multiples rites could be celebrated. Regardless, between 1849 and 1851 eight provincial councils in France would declare their adoption of the Roman Rite, "in no small part due to the role played by the powerful Ultramontane journal, L'Univers, edited by Louis Veuillot, which in 1846 took up the cause" (75). Guéranger himself would visit Rome in 1851 and was appointed as consultant to the Congregation of Rites and the Congregation of the Index by Pius IX. Shockingly to me, it was largely due to his Guéranger's influence that Gregorian chant was resurrected against things such as Mozart masses, or whatever sort of secular music was prevailing in those days. In 1853, in an encylical titled Inter Multiplices (Surely a call-back to the condemnation of the Gallican Articles in 1691!), Pope Pius IX would throw his weight in favor of the Roman rite in France, and following this, bishop after bishop would begin to install the rite in their dioceses, with a few holdouts in places such as Paris, or Orléans.
To be honest, I felt sad in reading this section of the book. I am always someone who has loved the diversity of Christianity. I spent a year and a half in Eastern Orthodoxy, and am thus someone who is very familiar with the Byzantine Rite, and I have much affection for it. I have also attended a Syro-Malabar Holy Qurbana on one occasion as well. It is sad to see the Gallican Rite swept away by the tide of history. In many ways, this sort of centralization was ongoing everywhere in the 19th century, but regardless, I view these as rich traditions that were worthy of preservation. Was this not why St. Pius V's bull of 1570 Quo Primum allowed for the preservation of liturgies more than two centuries old? I digress though. One more thing though that surprised me, as I already mentioned, was the relative newness of Gregorian chant, at least in the sense that it had to be reintroduced. I love Gregorian chant, but this is just another piece of evidence, I think, that certain Traditionalists are really just products of 19th century Ultramontanism when they insist that this is the way the Church was up until Vatican II or the Novus Ordo.
Moving onward to the Council itself, however, I actually have much less to say. The details given by O'Malley present the proceedings of the council itself as tedious for the bishops involved, with lots of negotiating, speeches and sometimes rancorous displays of disapproval from the bishops involved against the minority who opposed papal infallibility or viewed the doctrine as inopportune. It seems like to me, from my reading of the book, that there was never really any other outcome to Vatican I. The minority did indeed have some impressive figures lined up behind it, but they were unprepared to mount effective resistance, or to directly oppose the pope and create a schism within the Church. Almost all of the minority bishops would end up submitting to Pastor Aeternus in the end. We can be thankful for that. One thing that suprised me, however, is that opposed to those who often say that Vatican I's teaching is wholly historical decontextualized from Church history, is that Pastor Aeternus actually marshals together a decent basis of support for its claims, whether from the Council of Ephesus, Pope St. Gregory the Great, the 4th Council of Constantinople, the 2nd Council of Lyons and the Council of Florence. I believe that the continuity of Vatican I with Church history, especially viewed in historical context, is indeed underappreciated by many, and I hope that this review of the book spurs some interest in this fact.
I began this review / discussion of O'Malley's book with an extended historical contextualization of Vatican I. Pastor Aeternus seems to view itself this way as well, with section 9 of chapter 4 reading:
But since in this very age when the salutary effectiveness of the apostolic office is most especially needed, not a few are to be found who disparage its authority, we judge it absolutely necessary to affirm solemnly the prerogative which the only-begotten Son of God was pleased to attach to the supreme pastoral office.
Thus, at Vatican I, Gallicanism was finally solemnly cast aside into the dustbin of history in response to the needs of the day. It was the culmination of a long process in Church history against certain ecclesiological trends and ideas that had at various times places a great deal of influence and intellectual currency. The roots of the council are thus to be found in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and not viewed in isolation.
Overall, then, I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to know more about Vatican I and its context and history. I breezed through this book in a week, like I said, if that says anything in its favor. One thing I wished O'Malley had focused on a bit more was the response to Vatican I. He did this a little bit towards the end of the book, to be sure, but I would have liked to see the response of the major Protestant churches or the Eastern Orthodox to the decrees of the council. Also, as a very minor nitpick, I would have liked to hear a bit more about the Jesuit Joseph Kleutgen's involvement in the council. This man is a quite shady and scandalous figure, to say the least, and was involved to some degree with Supremi Pastoris' chapter 11, which would have dealt with infallibility (part of this document formed the basis for Pastor Aeternus), as well as the draft of Apostolici Muneris, which later became Dei Filius. His scandals were mentioned in the passing, but I guess O'Malley can be excused of this, given that it is really tangential to the council and its final decrees at the end of the day. Maybe I will read The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio by Hubert Wolf soon to make up on this.
Finally, it was interesting to see the discussion of how Vatican I shaped the Catholic Church into the 20th century, with the popes more and more coming into prominence and becoming public celebrities, and their increased role in the appointment of bishops, and in their teaching authority (most dramatically illustrated in the massive uptick in papal encyclicals and documents that was unleashed since the late 19th century with Leo XIII onward). Is this a blessing or a curse? Some traditionalists have begin to speak of 'hyperpaplism' in reference to an authoritarian overly papalist Francis pontificate, citing many of the things I write about here as evidence. In some ways I sympathize, in many others I do not. There is also great benefits from the centralization seen in the Catholic Church however. More than any other ecclesiastical figure in the world, when the Pope speaks, people listen. I do not think that we will see any dramatic turn back from what was inaugurated at Vatican I, for good or for ill, but we must understand the roots of today, so that we do not foolishly reject what the Church has decreed, especially when we exist in times that are somewhat trying for our faith.
Sources
Costigan, Richard F., The Consensus of the Church and Papal Infallibility: A Study in the Background of Vatican I
O’Malley, John W., Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church
https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-ix/la/documents/constitutio-dogmatica-pastor-aeternus-18-iulii-1870.html
https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/teachings/vatican-is-dogmatic-constitution-pastor-aeternus-on-the-church-of-christ-243