by Eamon Duffy
And indeed in the age of cheap popular print and the emergence of the mass media, the Pope himself became, quite literally, a popular icon. Catholic households from Africa to the Americas were as likely to display a picture of the Pope as a crucifix or a statue of the Virgin, and the face of Pio Nono was better known than that of any pope in history. Cheap books and mass-produced holy pictures spread and standardised the culture of Ultramontane Catholicism. In 1869 a book describing the first 200 miracles at Lourdes sold 800,000 copies. Lourdes itself was the product of the railway age, its pilgrims funnelled in from all over Europe and its offshore islands by steam packet and steam engine, in numbers and at speeds unimaginable in any previous century. The same mass transport brought pilgrims flocking to Rome to see and venerate the Pope, and, as his long pontificate stretched out, to celebrate his anniversaries.
This process was assisted by the charm of the Pope himself. Even his critics, exasperated by his stubbornness and unimpressed by his modest intellect, admitted that it was impossible to dislike him. He was genial, unpretentious, wreathed in clouds of snuff, always laughing. His sense of the absurd sometimes got the better of him, as when some earnest Anglican clergymen begged his blessing, and he teasingly pronounced over them the prayer for the blessing of incense, ‘May you be blessed by Him in whose honour you are to be burned,’ or when he scrawled at the bottom of a photograph of himself presented by a nun for an autograph the words of Christ in the storm, ‘Fear not, for it is I.’17 Above all, it was his human decency which impressed most, the open heart which made him exclaim on hearing of the death of his arch-enemy Cavour, ‘Ah, how he loved his country, that Cavour, that Cavour. That man was truly Italian. God will assuredly pardon him, as we pardon him.’18 The person of the Pope became part of the fabric of Catholic piety, and was enshrined even in the hymn-books:
Full in the panting Heart of Rome,
Beneath the Apostle’s crowning dome,
From pilgrim lips that kiss the ground,
Breathes in all tongues one only sound,
‘God bless our Pope, the great, the good.’19
However genial the Pope was in person, he had put himself at the head of a party within the Church which was anything but genial. In devotional terms Ultramontanism was a broadly based movement, in touch with some of the most powerful religious energies of the age. In doctrinal and institutional terms it was narrow, aggressive and intolerant. In journals like the French L’Univers, edited by Louis Veuillot, or the Jesuit Civiltà Cattolica, Ultramontanes extravagantly vamped up papal authority, and denounced not only the secular world which rejected the Church, but other Catholics whose opinions did not pass muster as sufficiently papalist. Everyone knew the Pope favoured this school of thought, and in 1853 he even published an encyclical, Inter Multiplices, defending Veuillot and L’Univers against the French bishops. The result was a suffocating churchiness, narrow, fearful and exclusive. The famous Anglican convert John Henry Newman, now leader of the Oratory community in Birmingham, and by Pio Nono’s standards a liberal, deplored this Ultramontane tendency to create a ‘Church within a Church’, and the failure of vision involved: ‘we are shrinking into ourselves, narrowing the lines of communication, trembling at freedom of thought, and using the language of dismay and despair at the prospect before us’.20
The leading English Ultramontane was Henry Edward Manning, whose main ally at Rome was Monsignor George Talbot, for many years Pio Nono’s most trusted confidant. Talbot ended his life in a lunatic asylum, and was probably unbalanced for years before his breakdown in 1869. He was certainly devious, feline, wreathed in intrigue, his view of the world and the Church a perpetual game of cowboys and Indians, heroes and villains. The villains included most of the English bishops, whom he thought disloyal anti-papalists, and Newman himself, in Talbot’s view ‘the most dangerous man in England’, still half a Protestant, and a leader of rebels – ‘his spirit must be crushed’. Talbot had the Pope’s ear, and was the key mover in the surprise appointment of Manning to succeed Cardinal Wiseman as archbishop of Westminster in 1865.
It was on the advice of men of this calibre that Pio Nono issued in 1864 the encyclical Quanta Cura, to which was attached the so-called Syllabus of Errors. As Pio Nono aged he became more responsive to Ultramontane pressure for strong, clear statements which would burn the bridges to the modern world that liberals like Count Montalembert were trying to build. The immediate trigger for the encyclical was the Catholic Congress held at Malines in Belgium in 1863, at which Montalembert had urged a reconciliation between the Church and democracy The alliance of throne and altar was doomed, he argued, bringing the Church into discredit. It was better to tolerate error in order that the truth could speak freely, than to attempt to suffocate it by persecution and the Inquisition.
Monatalembert’s speech was published under the headline ‘A Free Church in a Free State’, and the Ultramontanes flooded Rome with demands for his condemnation. In March 1864 the Pope instructed his Secretary of State Cardinal Antonelli to send letters of rebuke to Montalembert and the Archbishop of Malines, and in December, on the tenth anniversary of the definition of the Immaculate Conception, the encyclical itself appeared.21 Much of it, though cast in the now familiar Vatican form of the Jeremiad, was a matter of rounding up the usual suspects – Indifferentism, Freemasonry, Socialism, Gallicanism, Rationalism were all condemned. It was the Syllabus, a list of eighty condemned propositions, which caused general consternation. Here again, many of the condemned propositions were uncontroversial. All Christians agreed that it was a bad idea to claim that Jesus Christ was a mythical figure, or that revelation could add nothing to human reason (Propositions 5,7). No one can have been surprised to find Pio Nono condemning the view that the abolition of the temporal power of the Pope would be good for the Church (76). The final group of propositions, however, seemed designed to shock and offend, for example by denying that non-Catholics should be free to practise their religion (77). Above all, the last proposition seemed to sum up the Catholic Church’s war against modern society, for in it the Pope condemned the notion that ‘the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself with progress, liberalism, and recent civilisation’ (80).
The Syllabus was in fact a far less devastating document than it appeared at first sight. Its eighty propositions were extracted from earlier papal documents, and Pio Nono repeatedly said the true meaning of the Syllabus could be discovered only by referring to the original context. So, the offensive proposition 80 came from the brief Iamdudum Cernimus of 1861. Its apparently wholesale condemnation of ‘progress, liberalism and modern civilisation’ in fact referred quite specifically to the Piedmontese government’s closure of the monasteries and Church schools. But in December 1864 matters struck nobody in this light. The Syllabus was intended as a blow at liberal Catholicism, and everyone knew it. The English government representative in Rome, Odo Russell, reported that liberal Catholics, the Church’s ‘ablest and most eloquent defenders’, had been paralysed, ‘because they can no longer speak in her defence without being convicted of heresy … Silence and blind obedience must henceforward be their only rule of life.’ Russell was a sympathetic observer of Roman affairs, fond of Pio Nono, but even he thought that the Pope had put himself ‘at the head of a vast ecclesiastical conspiracy against the principles of modern society’.22
He was not alone in thinking so. The French government, whose troops were the only bulwark between the Pope and the Risorgimento, banned the Syllabus; it was publicly burned in Naples; Austria considered a ban but decided that this would breach the Concordat. Montalembert’s ally, Bishop Dupanloup of Orleans, wrote that ‘if we do not succeed in checking this senseless Romanism, the Church will be outlawed in Europe for half a century’. He worked day and night to produce a pamphlet in mitigation of the Syllabus, claiming that it was not a prescription for the actual conduct of the Church’s relations with society in the concrete, but an abstract outline of the ideal. This changeless ‘thesis’ neede
d – and, in the Church’s actual agreements through concordats and the like, in fact received – modification to adapt it to actual circumstances: the ‘antithesis’.
Dupanloup’s pamphlet was a tour de force which went a long way towards defusing non-Catholic hostility to the Syllabus, and gained breathing-space for liberal Catholicism. Six hundred and thirty-six bishops wrote to thank him for it, and Montalembert called it ‘a first-class verbal vanishing trick’. Pio Nono, daunted by the clamour the Syllabus had caused, also thanked him, but was privately unimpressed, and the Ultramontane juggernaut rolled on. On the feast of Sts Peter and Paul 1867, kept as the eighteenth centenary of the martyrdom of the Apostles, Pio Nono announced the summoning of a general council, to begin on 8 December 1869. Manning and other leading Ultramontane bishops took a solemn vow at the tomb of St Peter to work for the definition of papal infallibility at this, the First Vatican Council.
At first, however, infallibility was not on the agenda. The Pope had called the Council to tackle nineteenth-century unbelief and rationalism, which he thought were undermining Christianity, and to strengthen the Church in her stand against hostile societies and governments. As the date for the Council approached, however, it was clear to everyone that infallibility would be the dominating issue. Governments feared that the doctrines of the Syllabus would be made absolute, and thereby worsen the confrontation between Church and state. Liberal Catholics feared they were being edged out of the Church, and that an unlimited doctrine of papal infallibility would be imposed at the Council. All Catholics accepted that in fundamental matters the Church taught infallibly, and all accepted that solemn papal utterances spoke for the Church. Agreement ended there, however. Ultramontane enthusiasts like W. G. Ward attributed infallibility to almost every papal utterance. Ward thought that not only was the Syllabus infallible, but that every one of the other thirty encyclicals and allocutions from which the Syllabus quoted was thereby shown to be infallible. He wanted a new infallible statement from the Pope on the table every morning with The Times. Ultramontanes of this cast of mind imagined the Pope as permanently inspired, and were prone to statements like ‘the infallibility of the Pope is the infallibility of Jesus Christ himself’, or ‘when the Pope thinks, it is God who is thinking in him’.23
Few nineteenth-century Catholics rejected out of hand the notion that the Pope might teach infallibly. But many thought that it was dangerous to try to define just how and when that might happen. They thought it unnecessary, for the infallibility of the Church had never been defined, yet all Catholics believed it. They also thought such a definition inopportune, likely to inflame anti-Catholic feeling, to alienate Protestants and Eastern Orthodox Christians, to antagonise governments. Some, like Bishop Dupanloup, thought that in any case such a definition would be almost impossible to get right. How, for example, could the Pope’s teaching as an ordinary priest or theologian be distinguished from his solemn teaching ex cathedra (‘from his throne’)? This digging around in the roots of the Church’s authority, he feared, might kill the whole tree.24
Seven hundred bishops attended the Council, 70 per cent of all those eligible. Italians dominated – all five of the presidents, all the secretaries and two-thirds of the consultors (expert advisers) were Italian. The key posts in the Conciliar bureaucracy were held by supporters of infallibility. The initial sessions were taken up with the formulation of the decree Dei Filius, a strong assertion of the rationality of faith and the uniqueness of the Christian revelation. Attention soon turned, however, to the draft document on the Church, a lengthy affair which dealt with everything from the nature of ministry to the relations of Church and state. Debate dragged on, and Manning and his colleagues persuaded the Pope that it would be dangerous to leave the question of infallibility unresolved. The chapter dealing with infallibility was moved to the head of the agenda.
The Council was polarised between two groups, the infallibilist majority, led by Archbishop Manning, and the inopportunist minority, which included all the Austrian and German hierarchy, and many of the French. Initially, the Pope preserved a scrupulous neutrality, greeting known opponents of infallibility with warmth and friendliness. He was offended, however, by a widely publicised letter by the dying Montalambert which said that the infallibilists were ‘setting up their idol in the Vatican’, and by the attempts of liberal Catholics to prevent infallibility being discussed. Dupanloup tried to persuade Napoleon III to intervene. The English Catholic layman Sir John Acton, who was a pupil of the German leader of theological opposition to the definition, Ignaz von Döllinger, organised a campaign to whip up public opinion and British, French and German action to prevent the definition. There was talk of the English Cabinet sending a gunboat.
Both sides lobbied and plotted frantically. Manning recorded that the inopportunist minority ‘met often, and we met weekly to watch and counteract. When they went to Pius IX we went also. It was a running fight.’25 The Pope’s hand was decisively shown on 18 June, when the Dominican theologian Cardinal Guidi, Archbishop of Bologna, criticised the heading of the draft decree on infallibility, which ran ‘On the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff’. This was erroneous, Guidi insisted: the Pope was not infallible, though his teaching might be. Infallible teaching is irreformable, the teacher is not. Guidi went on to argue that a condition of infallibility was that it should not be exercised rashly. The Pope teaches in consultation with other bishops, and this needed to be indicated in the decree. He proposed that the wording should state that the Pope is assisted by ‘the counsel of the bishops manifesting the tradition of the churches’. This intervention was all the more powerful because Guidi was an infallibilist, basically in favour of the definition. His careful theological intervention, one of the weightiest of the whole Council, was designed to rule out any notion of an inspired or personally infallible Pope, and to protect the truth that the Pope taught not as an isolated monarch, but as first among the bishops. He was embraced by members of the minority as he descended from the podium. But Pio Nono was enraged. He summoned Guidi and berated him, as a cardinal and a bishop of the Patrimony, for treachery. Guidi replied that he had said only that bishops are witnesses to the tradition. ‘Witnesses of tradition?’ the Pope replied, ‘I am the tradition.’26
La tradizione son’ io. Pius’ magnificently arrogant aphorism laid bare both the attraction and the historical poverty of the infallibilist case. No controversy in the first thousand years of Christianity had been settled merely by papal fiat: even Leo I’s Tome had been adopted by a general council. Agreement on the truth in early Christianity had emerged by convergence, consensus, debate, painful and costly processes which took decades and even centuries to crystallise. Manning and his associates wanted history without tears, a living oracle who could short-circuit human limitation. They wanted to confront the uncertainties of their age with instant assurance, revelation on tap.
They did not get it. Guidi had his bad half-hour with Pio Nono, but his words had their effect. The final decree, drafted by Archbishop Cullen of Dublin, took account of Guidi’s arguments and was headed ‘De Romani Pontificia infallibili magisterio’ (‘On the infallible teaching office of the Roman Pontiff’). The wording of the decree itself was carefully hedged around with restrictions. It declared that:
The Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when, exercising the office of pastor and teacher of all Christians, he defines … a doctrine concerning faith and morals to be held by the whole Church, through the divine assistance promised to him in St Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer wished his Church to be endowed … and therefore such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church.27
Routine papal teaching, therefore, was not infallible. The Pope had to be speaking in a specially solemn form – ex cathedra. His teaching had to be on a matter of faith and morals (so not, for example, political denunciation of the kingdom of Italy, or instructions to Catholi
cs about how to vote), and it had to be about fundamentals, a matter to be held ‘by the whole Church’ (so not addressed merely to some passing debate). Such solemn statements were indeed declared to be irreformable ‘of themselves’ – ex sese a form of words designed specifically to refute the Gallican Articles of 1682, which said that papal definitions were only irreformable when they had been received by the Church. What the definition did not say, however, was that the Pope when teaching could or should act by himself, over against the Church rather than along with it. The wording avoided any comment on the processes by which such definitions emerge, and so did not concede the extreme Ultramontane case, in which the Pope need consult nobody, the idea implied in Pio Nono’s ‘I am the tradition.’ In fact, though it was not at once apparent, the Vatican definition called a halt to the wilder Ultramontane fantasies about the papacy: it was a defeat for men like Ward and Viuellot. It is some measure of the effectiveness of these restrictions that, since 1870, only one papal statement has qualified as ‘infallible’, the definition of the Assumption in 1950.
