Abstract
The reception of Vatican I has changed unexpectedly in the fifty years between the centennial and the sesquicentennial. The ultramontane papacy created by Vatican I, seen as blocking renewal after Vatican II, has developed over fifty years into the condition making a global church possible. This historiographical sketch of Vatican I’s reception organizes these surprising developments around three pivotal works: Hans Küng’s Infallible? An Inquiry, Jean-Marie Roger Tillard’s The Bishop of Rome, and Émile Perreau-Saussine’s Catholicism and Democracy.
Keywords
John O’Malley concludes his recent history of the First Vatican Council with a fascinating question for the reader: “In what ways and to what extent is the Catholic Church still ultramontane today?” 1 He offers no direct response. My own response would be that the Catholic Church is indeed still ultramontane today, but ours is a liberal ultramontanism.
To illuminate this liberal ultramontane church, to which Vatican I contributed so significantly and unexpectedly, this article will trace the developing contrast between the North American centenary reception of Vatican I in 1970 and its sesquicentenary reception in 2020. In 1970, many could only see ultramontanism and the papacy created by Vatican I as an obstacle to the renewal promised at the recently completed Vatican II with its opening to the “modern world.” Over the subsequent half century, however, events have unexpectedly turned an ultramontane papacy that developed in the context of European politics into a modern institution with a global reach. Neither nineteenth-century ultramontanes nor centenary-era commentators could have foreseen such a development.
Since 1970, new lines of sight onto the events of Vatican I have opened. This article argues that the reception of Vatican I has changed dramatically and unexpectedly in the fifty years between the centenary and the sesquicentennial. The ultramontane papacy created by Vatican I, seen as blocking renewal after Vatican II, has developed over the last fifty years into the condition making a global church possible. This historiographical sketch of Vatican I’s reception from 1970 to 2020 organizes these surprising developments around three pivotal works: Hans Küng’s Infallible? An Inquiry, Jean-Marie Roger Tillard’s The Bishop of Rome, and Émile Perreau-Saussine’s Catholicism and Democracy. 2 Each of these three works was published outside the United States and translated into English almost immediately. Scholarly discussion of them in North America represents the developing reception of Vatican I over fifty years.
Vatican I in 1970: Context
The complex context of Vatican I’s centenary reception begins with Vatican II (1962–65). Vatican II was a truly universal council whose participants came from all over the globe and mirrored the world church and the historical events unfolding around them. Europeans were driven by the hopes and fears provoked by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Some found themselves working with unlikely allies in their struggles to come back from the devastation of World War II. American participants were shaped by Kennedy’s New Frontier, the beginnings of the civil rights movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Johnson’s Great Society. 3 Indeed, Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963), addressed to “all men of good will,” epitomized the complex mood of these days. 4
Then came 1968. Three years earlier, in the opening line of Vatican II’s “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” the church solemnly claimed as its own “the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties” of people today. 5 The year 1968 seemed to tip the balance in favor of “griefs and anxieties.” The year began with the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Tet offensive in January, leading a deeply divided United States to realize the Vietnam War was a hopeless stalemate. The Defense Secretary resigned. The President announced he would not seek reelection. Soviet tanks rolled through the streets of Prague, cruelly dashing the Prague Spring. Memphis and Los Angeles witnessed heartbreaking assassinations. Riots erupted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Student protests around the world changed the lives of such Catholic thinkers as Henri de Lubac and Joseph Ratzinger, Michel de Certeau and Charles Curran. The great postwar economic boom of the 1960s ended with the recession of 1969. “Stagflation” continued for more than a decade. 6
Key for the centenary reception of Vatican I, however, was Pope Paul VI’s encyclical on birth control, Humanae Vitae, dated July 25, 1968. Paul VI shocked many Catholics by rejecting the recommendation of a commission, appointed during the council, that he mitigate or lift the church’s ban on what had come to be called “artificial contraception.” This encyclical and the turmoil surrounding it, along with the general mood of the time, tended to focus the centenary reception of Vatican I on issues of church authority and its abuse, and, specifically, on the dogmatic definition of papal infallibility found in chapter 4 of the council’s dogmatic constitution Pastor Aeternus. 7
Leading the charge against Humanae Vitae was the dashing, photogenic Swiss theologian who had risen to prominence during the council, Hans Küng (1928–2021). In 1970, he framed his challenge to the encyclical in terms of Vatican I’s dogmatic definition of papal infallibility and, given his previous work, interpreted it surprisingly strictly. Against the minimalist reading of the definition that eventually prevailed in Catholic theology after Vatican I, Küng offered a maximalist reading, reminiscent of some of the more extreme nineteenth-century statements of Cardinal Henry Edward Manning of Westminster. 8 “But the teaching of Vatican I really amounts to this,” Küng declared, “if he wants to, the pope can do everything, even without the Church.” 9 Reading Humanae Vitae as infallibly proposed, Küng wanted to force on Catholic theologians a most unwelcome choice: either accept the encyclical or reject the defined dogma of papal infallibility.
Authority and Infallibility
One of the most historically sophisticated theologians of his era, Küng demonstrated a firm grasp of the council’s history. His account of ultramontanism rightly focused on restorationist politics, but in 1970, when considering ultramontane preoccupation with infallibility, his very different political situation tended to blind him to ultramontane concern for legal papal independence from secular sovereigns. 10
Despite Küng’s historical acumen, however, centenary discussion of infallibility tended to be epistemological. Even Küng focused on how infallible claims could be possible in a changing world. 11 This epistemological emphasis shaped the discussion of Vatican I at its centenary and focused it on authority and infallibility. Gregory Baum responded that Küng paid too much attention to error and not enough to the “historicity of truth.” 12 Avery Dulles devoted four chapters in the third and final section of The Survival of Dogma to the question of the “Revision of Dogma.” 13 In question was the very nature of doctrine. Infallibility became the “crossroads of doctrine.” 14 The challenge of history, given short shrift at Vatican I, had become “historicity of truth,” largely an epistemological problem. 15
Centenary discussion of Vatican I and papal infallibility had become overly intellectualized. Richard McBrien’s critique of Küng’s book captures this development. McBrien rightly sought to shift the discussion of infallibility from the narrow perspective of Humanae Vitae and “the crisis of ecclesiastical leadership” to a broader perspective of “the nature and mission of the church.” 16 Writing in 1971, however, even such a distinguished theologian as McBrien was not expected to historicize present understandings of the nature and mission of the church with reference to ultramontanism and the historical and political events of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that, in fact, problematized the nature and mission of the church and drove Catholic theologians to an age of ecclesiology.
My intent is not to dismiss as theologically irrelevant either hermeneutical philosophy or the epistemological difficulties with possible infallible claims. But claims about Christian truth inevitably involve history. In Vatican I’s centenary year, Bernard Lonergan told a group of philosophers, Truths that are not eternal are relative, not to a place and time, but to the context of a place and time; but such contexts are related to one another; history includes the study of such relations; in the light of history, it becomes possible to transpose from one context to another; by such transposition one reaches a truth that extends over places and times.
17
In 1970, few theologians in the United States had begun to engage seriously either with what Lonergan called the functional specialty of history or with professional historians. As they emerged from the modern Scholasticism in which most had been trained, they were still working out the epistemological and hermeneutical questions that would have made sense of the kind of serious engagement with history that can display historical continuity within change. 18
History
The tradition of connecting historical to theological scholarship was much stronger in Germany than in the anglophone world. Five years after the centenary, Hermann Josef Pottmeyer highlighted the political dimensions of ultramontanism and Vatican I in Unfehlbarkeit und Souveränität (Infallibility and Sovereignty), an important work that regrettably has not been translated into English. 19 For example, excellent studies of the American and English bishops at Vatican I by James J. Hennesey and Frederick J. Cwiekowski, respectively, studied questions about infallibility and authority in an anglophone context; however, they did not draw much attention from theologians. 20
North American theologians, however, did show interest in historical studies in one important area during the centenary. Seeking to correct the asymmetry between Vatican I’s emphasis on papal primacy and Vatican II’s renewed consideration of the college of bishops (see, e.g., Lumen Gentium, §21–25), some theologians in North America turned to recent scholarship on medieval conciliar history. Once again, Hans Küng’s work received much attention for his treatment of the Council of Constance and questions about the church’s “constitution” in Structures of the Church. In the years after Vatican II, Brian Tierney’s Origins of Papal Infallibility and Francis Oakley’s Council over Pope? offered what seemed like historical inspiration for hoped-for reforms. 21
Mood of Protest
Already in 1967, a year before Humanae Vitae was published, church authorities had raised objections to Charles Curran’s teaching. Despite unanimous approval from departmental colleagues and confirmed by the faculty senate, Catholic University’s board of trustees—many of whom were bishops—voted not to renew Curran’s contract. The faculty voted overwhelmingly to join the students on strike. A black funereal catafalque was draped over the large university sign on Michigan Avenue, NE. The Catholic University of America had shut down. Four days later, the board reversed its decision and gave Curran a new contract.
When Humanae Vitae appeared, Curran did not protest alone. Bishops’ conferences in Canada, Belgium, Scandinavia, and elsewhere counseled Catholics that conscientious disagreement with the encyclical did not mean separation from the church. Curran immediately wrote a protest statement, signed by twenty Catholic University colleagues and, eventually, by a total of six hundred signers “qualified in the sacred sciences.” 22 Amid a growing culture of protest, fueled by the Vietnam War, little enthusiasm could be expected for celebrating the centenary of a decision seemingly taken against individual liberties in favor of an absolute authority.
Summary
Despite the claim that Vatican II continued and built on the work of Vatican I, it was the contrast between the two that looked more salient to scholars in 1970. To many, Vatican II appeared to negate its predecessor rather than complete it. Tendencies to read Vatican II’s post-conciliar conflicts back into Vatican I led to presentist identifications of nineteenth-century ultramontanes with Vatican II-era conservatives and Vatican I’s minority with the majority at Vatican II. Under the influence of modern Scholasticism’s lingering intellectual norms, scholars in 1970 tended to seek paths to continuity between the councils in epistemological inquiry about the nature of doctrine rather than in careful contextual reconstruction. As the postwar consensus began to unravel along with the postwar economic boom of the 1960s, protest and lament at the burden left by the definition of papal infallibility marked the tone of much centenary discussion.
Vatican I in the 1980s: Context
Jean-Marie Roger Tillard (1927–2000), a Canadian Dominican, taught on the Faculty of Theology at the Dominican College of Ottawa. His The Bishop of Rome was translated into English and appeared in the United States in 1983. It originally appeared in French the year before. By that time, a lot had changed. In the United States, Vietnam and the draft were over. The Reagan years of the 1980s brought an end not only to the previous decade’s economic stagnation, but also to the New Deal and what was left of the postwar consensus. People had tired of social unrest. Economic prosperity drew attention away from deepening social and political fissures. In Tillard’s Canada, Québec businessman and Reagan ally, the charismatic Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney, succeeded Liberal Party icon Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1984 and served as prime minister until 1993. He privatized many crown corporations and enacted economic reforms in keeping with the era’s business friendliness. The culture of protest and lament gave way to behaviors more in keeping with individual economic prosperity.
In the church, Pope John Paul II, barely a year after his election in 1978, revoked Hans Küng’s authorization to teach as a Catholic theologian. By the mid-1980s, he had driven most “dissenters” away or into hiding. Late in 1985, he called an extraordinary session of the Synod of Bishops to take stock twenty years after Vatican II. Looking back on the synod’s themes, three stand out. First, the signs of the times looked much less optimistic than in 1965. Work for justice remained, but the Cross moved to the fore. Second, going forward under John Paul II, rather than the people of God, images of mystery—and especially communion—dominated ecclesiological discourse at the magisterial level. Third, related to the contested notion of communion, bishops sharply disagreed about the status of episcopal conferences. Were they merely practical, or did they have theological significance as a dimension of collegiality? 23 In the United States, the episcopal conference published widely read pastoral letters on war (1983), in the context of the arms buildup, and the economy (1986), in the context of economic changes. Between 1988 and 1992, the conference also worked on a “A Pastoral Response to Women’s Concerns for Church and Society.” Its four drafts were variously titled, but the document was abandoned in the face of Vatican resistance.
The Bishop of Rome
Tillard’s The Bishop of Rome appeared in the context of the 1980s. As a young peritus for the Canadian bishops at Vatican II, Tillard made the extensive international contacts that made possible his lifelong ecumenical work with the World Council of Churches and bilateral dialogues with Orthodox, Anglicans, and Disciples of Christ. During the 1980s, he served as a member of the International Theological Commission. His ecumenism informed his theology in general and especially his interpretations of Vatican I. After all, the “Bishop of Rome,” is a distinctly non-ultramontane title for the pope.
The centenary of Vatican I had occasioned extensive ecumenical dialogue on authority and infallibility. The Lutheran/Roman Catholic Dialogue USA, for example, the country’s most active ecumenical bilateral, dialogued extensively between 1973 and 1978 on “teaching authority and infallibility in the church.” Volume VI of Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue included a common statement with Lutheran and Catholic reflections and fifteen papers from the dialogue. 24
By 1982, based on these and other dialogues, Tillard judged it time for “deeper dogmatic study.” He caught “a sense of unease” growing among Catholics, members of other ecumenically inclined churches, and ecclesial bodies around topics such as “structures of collegiality and ministerial subsidiarity,” “episcopal conferences,” and the “synods periodically meeting in Rome.” Such bodies had failed to fulfill the promise of Lumen Gentium. 25
The need to read the two councils together was a key insight of the 1980s. His experience as a working ecumenist convinced Tillard of the need to re-read “in light of the Great Tradition what the two Vatican councils had said about the function of the bishop of Rome.” 26 He calls Pastor Aeternus “a subtle document with an ultramontane outlook,” but one which “lends itself to a moderate interpretation when the finer points of the discussion surrounding it are taken into account, marginally though these are represented in the text itself.” 27
Tillard makes clear that many of these “finer points” appear in the conciliar interventions of Bishop Federico Zinelli of Treviso on behalf of the Deputation on Faith, the body in charge of the texts at Vatican I, especially on the description, in Pastor Aeternus, chapter 3, of the pope’s jurisdiction as “ordinary and immediate,” and how that affects the authority of local bishops. 28 As has been pointed out with respect to Bishop Vincenz Gasser’s intervention regarding the definition of papal infallibility and its relation to the college of bishops in chapter 4, Zinelli failed to change the text. For Tillard, however, both interventions are part of the discussion’s “finer points.”
With respect to Pastor Aeternus, Vatican II offers “a new reading in a new context with fragile results.” “Fragile” because the issues related to collegiality and synodality that set Tillard on his path remain to be resolved. Hopeful, because, although Vatican II’s minority demanded a “repeat” of Pastor Aeternus, the “repeat” was no longer in an ultramontane context but controlled by “the more balanced and lucid elements of the minority at Vatican I.” Tillard concludes: We may say, therefore, that at Vatican II, Pastor Aeternus was “received” in the dogmatic sense by the minority of Vatican I after nearly a century of deepening study and fresh thought. The importance of this new reception in a new climate is too little recognized: Vatican I and Vatican II together form a dialectical unity in which one should be interpreted by the other.
29
As Tillard makes clear, ultramontanism continues to haunt Catholic imaginations. The tension remains between the primate whose “corporate personality” can represent the entire college and the college itself. It comes with practical questions about collegiality, the status of episcopal conferences, the Synod of Bishops, and synodality itself. 30
Tillard pursued the ecumenical ecclesiological lines of research begun in The Bishop of Rome through the 1980s and into the next decade. In 1995, five years before Tillard’s death, Pope John Paul II put his signature to the ecumenical encyclical Ut Unum Sint, with its long section on “the ministry of unity of the Bishop of Rome.” Tillard was rumored to be Ut Unum Sint’s primary drafter. 31 Vatican I’s “fragile results” remained in the tension between the primate and the college.
Vatican I in 2011–2020: Context
In 2011, Émile Perreau-Saussine’s (1972–2010) Catholicism and Democracy appeared posthumously in France a year after his untimely death. Following his mentor, Pierre Manent, Perreau-Saussine sought to recover political philosophy after secularization and totalitarianism. He came of age intellectually in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks and the changes they brought. The bombing of the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris took place in 2011, the year after Perreau-Saussine’s death.
Trending economic globalization and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 diminished the importance of nation-states in world affairs, lending a fresh significance to global institutions like the papacy. Catholicism and Democracy appeared as the world’s attention was shifting from Europe and North America to the Middle East, Asia, and the Global South. For most of Perreau-Saussine’s life, John Paul II was pope. His moral presence in world affairs contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union and the cause of human rights. He offered a glimpse of how a now global papacy, born at Vatican I from the remnants of confessionalism, might contribute to a political philosophy that could navigate politically between liberalism, viewed as individual autonomy, and totalitarianism.
In his extensive comments on John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Perreau-Saussine emphasized Vatican II as the continuation of Vatican I and, indeed, pronounced this continuity as the theme of his book. With the body politic degraded by secularization, and having no transcendent referent or higher law, “Catholics had to look to Rome for the religious authority that could no longer be found within the framework of the nation.” 32
For Perreau-Saussine, the “most dynamic Catholic churches in the world” were to be found not in the formerly confessional European states, but in the postcolonial Global South: Africa, South America, and Asia. 33 Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI were creatures of Europe, World War II, and the Cold War. With the historic resignation of Benedict XVI in 2013 came a new pope “from the end of the world.” He introduced himself as “the Bishop of Rome.”
Catholicism and Democracy
In a landmark sesquicentennial reflection on Vatican I, Massimo Faggioli speaks of a “‘Vatican I–Vatican II papacy’ for a Global Catholicism” and the present need to reengage with Vatican I. Like Tillard, Faggioli insists the two Vatican councils be read together, neither in opposition nor in complete continuity. A new papal perspective, we might call it global, makes this a new sesquicentennial reading. 34
Faggioli singles out Catholicism and Democracy as a “particularly insightful contribution for the debate on Vatican I at its 150th anniversary.” For Perreau-Saussine, ultramontanism’s staying power is not in its restorationism and legitimism but in its distinguishing the religious and the political. The ultramontane movement is modern, a “‘product’ of the secularization of the state.” Faggioli calls Perreau-Saussine’s view a “nineteenth-century liberal interpretation of Vatican I.” 35 For Faggioli, Perreau-Saussine’s approach reflects the closing of political life to any religious dimension and the subsequent need to look to Rome for any transcendent perspective. We see how this works when Perreau-Saussine places the question about the “nature and mission of the church” in the context of the anti-clerical events in the French Revolution of 1789.
In his treatment of these events early in the Revolution, Perreau-Saussine historicizes the centennial question about the “nature and mission of the church.” By October 1790, threatened with the complete triumph of “parliamentary Gallicanism” and the reduction of the church to a department of the state, French bishops turned to Pope Pius VI. This appeal to Rome by a body of bishops traditionally inclined to independence constitutes “in the history of the Church, the first event that can really be called Ultramontane.” 36
By proposing that all citizens, members of the church or not, elect clergy and bishops, the Civil Constitution began, perhaps inadvertently, a long and often interrupted process that legally defined the church as a social body or global community transcending the state out of existence. Whether a department of the state or a free association of citizens, the church could not be the body of Christ in space and history, Perreau-Saussine’s “church as a social fact.” 37 Ultramontanism responded to the crisis of reimagining the church for a post-confessional world after the Revolution’s attempt to reduce the church to a department of the state.
Though previous treatments of Vatican I tended to emphasize the ultramontane council’s “antimodern tendencies,” for Perreau-Saussine, Vatican I led not to a “resurgence of the papacy’s temporal ambitions but a refocusing on its spiritual role.” He concludes, “the development of ideas about papal authority reflected wider developments in ecclesiology made necessary by the division of politics and religion consequent upon the French Revolution.” 38
This shift of perspective, emphasizing church and papal independence from state control, is crucial for grasping the unintended long-term consequences of ultramontanism. Threats against the church’s independence like the Civil Constitution resurfaced in Italy following the political upheaval caused throughout Europe by the revolutions of 1848, the Risorgimento, the seizure of the Papal States in 1860, and the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Most ultramontanes assumed that unless the pope was sovereign over his own lands, subject to no other sovereign, the church could not be free. 39
In 1864, two days after raising with his advisers the possibility of a new council, Pius IX responded to these traumatic blows to the post-Napoleonic Restoration of 1815 with his notorious Syllabus of Errors. Two condemnations in particular sum up the crisis fostered by the Civil Constitution’s logic. Proposition 19 condemns the position that “the church is not a true and perfect society of equal liberty . . . but instead, the civil power can define the rights and limits within which the church may exercise its authority.” Proposition 39 condemns the claim that “the republic is the origin and source of all rights, and it possesses rights which are not circumscribed by any limits.” 40
Perreau-Saussine captures the significance of the Syllabus as a declaration of the church’s independence, even as he suggests that Pius IX failed to grasp the full significance of his own reasoning as an embrace of separation of church and state. A good example is Perreau-Saussine’s insightful portrayal of French minority bishops at Vatican I, along with their German counterparts, as backward-looking bourgeois conservatives who could not see that the confessional era was dead and who wanted to retain their national churches’ traditional ties to newly secularizing states. Ultramontanes feared that in a new post-confessional world, where Gallicanism no longer made sense, bishops such as Félix Dupanloup in France and theologians such as Ingaz von Döllinger in German lands would become unwitting dupes of rulers who wanted to use the church for their own purposes. 41
In 1970, ultramontanism, when discussed, was something to be repudiated and left behind. Forty years later, in advance of Vatican I’s sesquicentennial, Perreau-Saussine found at ultramontanism’s heart “a core of liberalism” and concluded that its influence “ought not be entirely repudiated.” 42 In Perreau-Saussine’s analysis, ultramontanism sounds eerily like that of the previously condemned Felicité de Lamennais, the nineteenth-century French priest and political writer who combined a papalized church as a “social body” with an acceptance of individual liberty and equality. When Lamennais realized during the Bourbon Restoration that, without the independence offered by the pope, the church would always be subordinate to the newly secularized state, he became a liberal ultramontane. In Perreau-Saussine’s reading, Lamennais’s “liberal ultramontanism” eventually overcomes Maistre’s authoritarian vision of papal monarchy. 43 Vatican I thus laid the groundwork for an eventual separation of religion and politics, as well as a “new role for the laity,” the title of the second half of Catholicism and Democracy.
Perreau-Saussine sets the stage for theology’s historical retrieval of the political and cultural dimensions of ultramontanism. Highlighting this new emphasis on ultramontanism’s historical and political significance is the striking fact that some of the most theologically relevant contemporary scholarship on the council in English comes from historians: Thomas Albert Howard (2017), David Kertzer (2018), and John O’Malley (2018). All three portray ultramontane figures such as Maistre, Pius IX, and Manning as believable historical actors. 44 As Kristin Colberg has argued, “The issues which the church in the nineteenth century sought to engage were not solely theological but also political and philosophical in nature.” Far from purely theological, the council’s “principal purpose,” she concludes, “was to preserve the independence of the church by securing its voice in a world that seemed . . . opposed to its very existence.” 45
By 2020, Massimo Faggioli, in reflecting on partial political and theological continuities between the two Vatican councils and on the future of the “Vatican I–Vatican II papacy,” could argue that “Vatican I was a steppingstone toward the development of the modern global papacy of Vatican II and of the post-Vatican II period.” 46 In a culture of protest, centenary commentators were often inclined to interpret the jurisdictional language of Pastor Aeternus, chapter 3, solely as a papal power grab. Such a reading misses both the dire political straits in which the church found itself and the extent to which ultramontanism was a popular movement.
At the sesquicentennial, by contrast, Faggioli reads it as primarily about the church’s independence: “Pastor Aeternus was about the new role of papal primacy, not about the frequency and role of declarations enjoying papal infallibility.” 47 Having been clearly invoked only once since 1870, papal infallibility—which dominated centenary discussions of Vatican I—now seems surprisingly inconsequential given the stature it gained with Vatican I.
Faggioli concludes that, despite their undeniable “counterrevolutionary” and “reactionary” nature, ultramontane claims such as those in chapter 3 eventually produced elements of “institutional novelty” and “modernity.” He goes so far as to claim that this new “Vatican I–Vatican II papacy” makes possible Pope Francis’s bold (his opponents might say reckless) attempt to overcome the polarities of papacy and episcopacy with a nationally oriented “synodality.” 48
History suggests that the ultramontane church has used its independence well ad extra. Its long-term effects reach far beyond the internal life of the church to the present global papacy. Recent trends in modern European history demonstrate how ultramontanism’s universalizing the church under the pope helped, in the long term, to make the church a key actor for justice on the world stage. 49
Ad intra, the “fragility” of present readings of Pastor Aeternus continues to manifest in the constitutionally unresolved tension between the primate and the episcopal college. In refusing to go it alone on the road to synodality, Pope Francis is challenging bishops to develop and apply postconciliar teaching on synodality.
Unintended Ultramontanism
Ultramontanism has an effective history that extends in unanticipated ways into the twentieth century and beyond. We have a global church, made possible in part by a global papacy, a church that accepts the secularity of the state and the reality of two societies, a church that is even a defender of individual political liberties. Within the church, the present Bishop of Rome and heir to an ultramontane papacy is trying to recognize the baptismal dignity of individual lay religious subjects by bringing the synodal experience of the Latin American church to the whole church.
It is difficult to survey this twenty-first-century church without concluding with Perreau-Saussine that what we have now is “liberal ultramontanism.” But that might be deceptive. Perreau-Saussine is writing about what his subtitle calls the “history of political thought.” His emphasis on political thought makes history sound smoothly forgone, de-emphasizing its unintended consequences. How could Pius IX, for example, have understood that his refusal to invite secular sovereigns to the council, amounted to an implicit affirmation (as a French diplomat claimed at the time) of the secularity of the state and the church-state separation—views that the pope had just explicitly condemned in the Syllabus of Errors?
However, Perreau-Saussine’s emphasis on political thought attends insufficiently to both Tillard’s “fragile results” of new readings of Pastor Aeternus and to history’s possible future unintended results. With the popularity of authoritarian politics, the resurgence of integralism in the church, and vocal opposition—especially in the United States—to the reforms of both Vatican II and the present pope himself, we might work and pray for synodality, but our true hope for synodality lies with the hearts of the bishops and laity to whom, thanks to our ultramontane pope, it now falls to make synodality real.
The centenary of Vatican I in 1970 and the 150th anniversary in 2020 bookend my life as a student of theology. I could never have anticipated in 1970 the shape of Vatican I’s reception in 2020. If I could return in 2070, I know the state of both church and world would shock and amaze me. The way historians and theologians narrated Vatican I at two hundred would surely shock and amaze me even more. 50
Footnotes
1
2
Hans Küng, Infallible? An Inquiry, trans. Edward Quinn (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1972). Doubleday first published the English translation in 1971. J. M. R. Tillard, The Bishop of Rome, trans. John de Satgé (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1983); Émile Perreau-Saussine, Catholicism and Democracy: An Essay in the History of Political Thought, trans. Richard Rex, fwd. Alasdair MacIntyre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
3
See Stephen Schloesser, “Against Forgetting: Memory, History, Vatican II,” in Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?, ed. David G. Schultenover (New York: Continuum, 2008), 92–152.
6
7
“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.” Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (London and Washington, DC: Sheed & Ward and Georgetown University Press, 1990), II, 816. On minimalist and maximalist readings of this definition, see William L. Portier, “The First Vatican Council, John Henry Newman, and the Making of a Post-Christendom Church,” Newman Studies Journal 17, no. 1 (Summer 2020): 123–44 at 123–27, 
. This issue also contains essays on Vatican I by Kristin Colberg and Shaun Blanchard, all from the conference “Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the First Vatican Council,” National Institute of Newman Studies, Pittsburgh, PA, March 14–15, 2019.
8
On Manning, see Jeffrey von Arx, “Cardinal Henry Edward Manning,” in Varieties of Ultramontanism, ed. Jeffrey von Arx (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1998), 85–101.
9
10
See Küng, Infallible?, 78–84. Earlier in the nineteenth century, churches in German lands had successfully negotiated for certain governmental supports from secular states, a situation from which Küng benefited at Tübingen, just as Ignaz von Döllinger had benefited before him in nineteenth-century Munich.
11
See, for example, Küng on the “problematic of propositions as such” and the “problematic of ecclesiastical definitions,” in Infallible?, 152–55, 142–45.
12
Gregory Baum, George Lindbeck, Richard McBrien, and Harry J. McSorley, The Infallibility Debate, ed. John J. Kirvan (New York and Paramus, NJ: Paulist Press, 1971), Gregory Baum, 1–33 at 1–8.
13
Avery Dulles, The Survival of Dogma: Faith, Authority, and Dogma in a Changing World (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1973).
14
See Peter Chirico, Infallibility: The Crossroads of Doctrine (Kansas City: Sheed, Andrews, and McMeel, 1977).
15
In his recent history of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA), Charles Curran singled out “historicity” as a main area of theological content between 1971 and 1995. See Charles E. Curran, The Catholic Theological Society of America: A Story of Seventy-Five Years (New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2021), 93–99.
16
McBrien, The Infallibility Debate, 35.
17
Bernard J. F. Lonergan, “Philosophy and Theology,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 44 (1970): 19–30 at 30, . As he concluded The Survival of Dogma, first published in 1971, Avery Dulles cited R. Norris Clarke in the same vein on “the power of the mind to transcend its own sociocultural frameworks and its own conceptual schemes.” See Dulles, Survival of Dogma, 209. Lonergan’s Method in Theology, published in 1972, included among theology’s eight functional specialties both history and interpretation. See Method in Theology (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), 127–33; 175–234.
18
See James Hennesey’s 1971 address to the CTSA, “American History and the Theological Enterprise: History, Theology, and Historical Theologians,” Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America 26 (1971): 91–115, . See his description of what historians study at 92.
19
Hermann Josef Pottmeyer, Unfehlbarkeit und Souveränität: Die päpstliche Unfehlbarkeit im System der ultramontanen Ekklesiogie des 19. Jahrhunderts (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1975).
20
See James J. Hennesey, The First Vatican Council: The American Experience (New York: Herder and Herder, 1963); Frederick J. Cwiekowski, The English Bishops and the First Vatican Council (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1971).
21
See Hans Küng, Structures of the Church, trans. Salvator Attansio (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1964), 251–302; Francis Oakley, Council Over Pope? Towards a Provisional Ecclesiology (New York: Herder & Herder, 1969); Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150–1350 (London: E.J. Brill, 1971).
22
23
On the Extraordinary Synod, see Avery Dulles, Vatican II and the Extraordinary Synod: An Overview (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1986), 28. On the disputed question of the status of episcopal conferences, see Thomas Reese, ed., Episcopal Conferences: Historical, Canonical and Theological Studies (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1989). The preface explains the issue of episcopal conferences’ status in the 1980s.
24
Paul C. Empie, T. Austin Murphy, and Joseph A. Burgess, eds., Teaching Authority and Infallibility in the Church, Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue VI (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1980). See also Peter J. McCord, ed., A Pope for All Christians? An Inquiry into the Role of Peter in the Modern Church (New York, Paramus, and Toronto: Paulist Press, 1976).
25
Tillard, Bishop of Rome, xi–xii. On Tillard, see Christopher Ruddy, The Local Church: Tillard and the Future of Catholic Ecclesiology (New York: Herder & Herder, 2006), especially chapters 5 and 6.
26
Tillard, Bishop of Rome, 193.
27
Tillard, 26, 28.
28
Tillard, 133–37, see also 131–32.
29
Tillard, 34–35.
30
Tillard, 159–65. For Tillard’s sense of primate, see 165.
32
33
Perreau-Saussine, Catholicism and Democracy, 138.
34
Massimo Faggioli, “Vatican I, the New Papacy, and the Crisis of Catholic Globalization,” Newman Studies Journal 17, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 5–21 at 15–16, . This article is based on Faggioli’s lecture at the conference, mentioned in note 7, “Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the First Vatican Council,” National Institute of Newman Studies, Pittsburgh, PA, March 14–15, 2019.
35
Faggioli, “Vatican I, the New Papacy,” 16, 15.
36
Friedrich Heyer, The Catholic Church from 1648–1870, trans. D. W. D. Shaw (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1969), 151. Heyer called the nineteenth century in Catholic theology “the age of ecclesiology” (127–31); on the Civil Constitution, see 96–100. A Lutheran, trained in Tübingen’s ecumenical environment, Heyer published his book during Vatican II in 1963. The English translation appeared at the centenary of Vatican I. On Gallicanism and Congar’s threefold division of it as a “temperament” or “practical attitude” into “royal, ecclesiastical (bishops and Paris theologians) and parliamentary” Gallicanism, see William L. Portier, “Church Unity and National Traditions: The Challenge to the Modern Papacy, 1682–1870,” in The Papacy and the Church in the United States, ed. Bernard Cooke (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989), 27–54 at 28–32.
37
Perreau-Saussine, Catholicism and Democracy, 90. To safeguard and explain the “church as a social fact” is why we are in the “age of ecclesiology,” why both Vatican councils needed dogmatic constitutions on the church, and why incarnation-based images such as mystical body and sacrament became prevalent in subsequent ecclesiology.
38
Perreau-Saussine, Catholicism and Democracy, 63, 67.
39
“One thing is certain: let all the Civil Powers of this world . . . claim the Vicar of Christ as their subject, a subject he will never be. . . . The infallible head of an infallible Church cannot depend on the sovereignty of man.” Henry Edward Manning, The Vatican Council and its Definitions: A Pastoral Letter to the Clergy, 4th ed. (New York: P. J. Kennedy, 1902), 165–66.
40
For the Latin text and a new English translation, see John P. Slattery, Faith and Science at Notre Dame: John Zahm, Evolution, and the Catholic Church (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), appendix A, at 171 for Proposition 19; at 175 for Proposition 39.
41
Perreau-Saussine, Catholicism and Democracy, 71–73. Perreau-Saussine interestingly notes the liberal statesman Émile Ollivier’s claim that the Syllabus promotes separation of church and state in spite of itself. Perreau-Saussine, 61–69. On Ollivier, see also O’Malley, Vatican I, 114.
42
Perreau-Saussine, Catholicism and Democracy, 46, 68.
43
Faggioli praises this liberal ultramontane interpretation as “more fecund than the current theological-political debate in English-speaking Catholicism today.” “Vatican I, The New Papacy,” 15. On Lamennais and liberal ultramontanism, see Perreau-Saussine, Catholicism and Democracy, 59–60; 69–70; O’Malley, Vatican I, 67–68; Tillard, Bishop of Rome, 21. On Isaac Hecker’s liberal ultramontanist perspective on the council as seen from the US, see William L. Portier, Isaac Hecker and the First Vatican Council (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1985), 159–68.
44
David I. Kertzer, The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe (New York: Random House, 2018); Thomas Albert Howard, The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Döllinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Howard’s emphasis on the conflict between scientific history and the ultramontane imagination brings to life the world in which ultramontanism made sense. See my review in Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 115, nos. 3–4 (2020): 893–95, .
45
Kristin M. Colberg, Vatican I and Vatican II: Councils in the Living Tradition (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2016), 30, 40. For representative sesquicentennial literature on Vatican I, in addition to the issues of Newman Studies Journal mentioned in notes 7 and 34, see also Kristin Colberg, “Looking at Vatican I’s Pastor Aeternus 150 Years Later: A Fresh Consideration of the Council’s Significance Yesterday and Today,” Horizons 46, no. 2 (December 2019): 323–47, https://doi.org/10.1017/hor.2019.57; Jeffrey Von Arx, Massimo Faggioli, Christian D. Washburn, Susan A. Ross, and Shaun Blanchard, “Vatican I’s Teaching on Papal Infallibility: Nineteenth-Century Historical Context and Twenty-First-Century Relevance–Theological Roundtable,” Horizons 47, no. 1 (June 2020): 109–38, .
46
Faggioli, “Vatican I, the New Papacy,” 7.
47
Faggioli, 9. See also Klaus Schatz, Papal Primacy: From Its Origins to the Present, trans. John A. Otto and Linda M. Maloney (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press,1996), 166–67. In this book, first published in German in 1990, Schatz notes that papal primacy of jurisdiction has achieved “a greater scope than it actually had in 1870.” For his comments on the note “to be definitively held by all faithful” attached by John Paul II to certain teachings of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis and Evangelium Vitae, see 173n53.
48
Faggioli, “Vatican I, the New Papacy,” 11, 15.
49
Especially relevant here is the work of Samuel Moyn on human rights and that of scholars influenced by him on Catholicism and twentieth-century European political and intellectual life. See Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2010) and Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), and my review in Horizons 46, no. 2 (December 2019): 372–74, https://doi.org/10.1017/hor.2019.66; Giuliana Chamedes, A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019); Edward Baring, Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). See also the Roundtable Review Discussion at H-Net XX, No. 9 (2018) with reviews of Chappel by Thomas Brodie, Chamedes, John T. McGreevey, and Chappel’s response, . Note especially the exchange between Chamedes and Chappel.
50
My thanks to Kristin Colberg for organizing our CTSA panel on Vatican I’s 150th anniversary, to fellow panelist John O’Malley, and to the anonymous peer reviewer who helped me turn a panel presentation into the present article.