Pope Pius IX and the Emergence of Modernity

In three parts last fall, I discussed at length a fascinating book, T.A. Howard's magnificent study: The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Dollinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age (Oxford UP, 2017), 312pp.

That pope, who ruled for so long and in often reactionary and ruinous ways, has come in for sustained controversy recently in the pages of First Things and elsewhere. Now he will be subject to yet more critical examination in a book set for release next month: The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe by David I. Kertzer (Random House, 2018), 512pp.

About this book the publisher, a bit breathlessly, tells us the following:

The Pulitzer-winning author of The Pope and Mussolini takes on a pivotal, untold story: the bloody revolution that spelled the end of the papacy as a political power and signaled the birth of modern Europe.

The longest-reigning pope, Pope Pius IX, also oversaw one of the greatest periods of tumult and transition in Church history. When Pius IX was elected in 1846, the pope was still a king as well as a spiritual leader, and the people of the Papal States sang his praises, hopeful that he would reform the famously corrupt system of "priestly rule" over which his much unloved predecessor, Gregory XVI, had presided. At first, Pius IX tried to please his subjects, replacing priests with laymen in government and even granting the people a constitution. But, as the revolutionary spirit of 1848 swept through Europe, the pope found he could not both please his subjects and defend the rights of the church. The resulting drama--involving a colorful cast of characters, from Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and his rabble-rousing cousin Charles Bonaparte, to Garibaldi, Tocqueville, and Metternich--was one of treachery, double-dealing, and international power politics. By its end, the Papacy--and Europe--was transformed.

The Pope and the Professor (II)

As I noted here, this new book, The Pope and the Professor:Pius IX, Ignaz von Dollinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age, is a splendid and deeply fascinating one both on its own merits but also as a useful text to consider amidst ongoing challenges to and about papal authority in this Franciscan era.

Howard begins from the premise that the "modern age" really begins with the very long 19th century, a century he and others see as running from 1789 to 1914, that is from the Bastille in France to the trenches of France and Flanders during the Great War. This was a period marked, inter alia, by the return of "religion" after many were predicting its demise, not least because of the massively bloody and utterly shattering attack on the Catholic Church unleashed by the French Revolution.

Those predicting secularization during this period because of the collapse of Catholic life and faith gave short shrift to examining actual Catholic practices, then and since. And thus much history of the period is written from a perspective that presupposes the good of ongoing secularization and consequently does not bother to inquire into the details of Catholic debates. This is one of the tasks Howard sets out for himself, remedying the lack of detailed examination of how Catholics themselves actually viewed the world of this long century, and whether they were united in either pro-secularization narratives, or narratives of reaction and revanchism. He attempts to take Catholic arguments seriously on their own terms, refusing to dismiss theological claims merely because they are theological. In so doing he has written an immeasurably stronger book.

It is, in fact, on debates about history, historiography, and "historical mindedness" that so much of this story turns. Much of the conflict between Ignaz von Döllinger, on the one hand, and Pope Pius IX (and his erstwhile court and followers) on the other comes down to the relationship between theology and history and the relativizing the latter was thought to do of the truth-claims of the former. Any such relativizing was heavily disdained by the papal court and hangers-on. Döllinger, by contrast, refused to see how historical evidence could be treated so disdainfully and dismissively, and stood by it (or at least his perception of it) even when it resulted in his excommunication.

Virtually alone of all the controversial Catholic figures of the long 19th century, Döllinger remains excommunicated and unrehabilitated. It is the burden--but only one of several--of Howard's book to examine why this is so, and to show us the uncomfortable challenges of conscience and authority that the German scholar's life still poses for Catholics today. These challenges are especially brought to the fore in chapter 3, treating the immediate ante-conciliar period as well as the First Vatican Council itself and its immediate aftermath. Döllinger refused to submit to its decree on papal primacy and infallibility, and was as a result excommunicated. He refused because as an historian he saw--quite rightly--that the evidence for anyone believing in papal jurisdiction and infallibility as was debated in 1869-70 was virtually non-existent for the entire first millennium and most of the second. He refused, moreover, because he was an ecumenist avant la lettre, and saw that infallibility and universal jurisdiction were not just impossible to ground historically but impossible to justify ecumenically.

The other challenge which Döllinger refused to look away from was that of the motives behind the conciliar definition, a problem I have myself addressed elsewhere. As Howard notes, "to understand how the teaching on infallibility came bursting to the forefront of theological conversations in the late 1860s, one must take into consideration the severe threat that the papacy experienced by forces of Italian unification" (118)--to say nothing of earlier, but still potent, threats from the French Second Empire and the various European revolutions of 1848. In the face of all these threats, "infallibility became not only the desired instrument of a counter-offensive, but also simply the right and proper theological thing to do" (119).

At the same time, however, one must not be so reductive and simplistic as to see this decree as solely the result of and reaction to external threats. As Howard goes on very rightly to insist, "papal infallibility, it merits reiterating, could hardly have succeeded if it did not enjoy broad international support from the lay faithful."  One must, therefore, resist the temptation to see "that infallibility was...cooked up by ultramontane polemicists of the Pope in a time of political crisis; it possessed much deeper sanction in the Catholic intellectual tradition" (122).

Continues. 

A Word from Adrian Fortescue

I was invited to be keynote lecturer at the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary's annual conference this past weekend at the lovely Catholic college in Newburgh, NY.

I chose as my topic a question that has long perturbed me: why did Pope Pius IX feel he had the right to proceed with a unilateral dogmatic declaration in 1854 concerning the conception of the Theotokos when:

a) no pope before had dared to dream of doing such a thing; and
b) no dogmatic crisis--whether in Mariology or theology proper in the strict sense--was at hand, and thus the old rule of "nothing is defined until it is denied" was not applicable.

Various traditions and scholars agree that there was no crisis to hand, and thus no obvious dogmatic or theological reason to proceed with a definition. The Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission, in several places between 1981 and 2004 (helpfully studied in Studying Mary: The Virgin Mary in Anglican and Catholic Theology and Devotion) agreed that the Immaculate Conception arose when there was no crisis to hand.

The great Russian Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov says the same thing, rather wearily and acerbically, in his book The Burning Bush: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God. And even conservative Catholic scholars such as Sr. Sara Butler agree that there was no crisis to hand, and thus the justification for a definition must be sought on quite other than theological grounds.

The short answer I proffered, drawing on an article I published last year (“Sovereignty, Politics, and the Church: Joseph de Maistre’s Legacy for Catholic and Orthodox Ecclesiology,” Pro Ecclesia 24 [2015]: 366-389), was that the French Revolution, combined with widespread revolutionary turmoil in 1848, led the pope to realize that there was a crisis to hand, a crisis centred precisely on papal power in the temporal realm, which was rapidly coming to a disastrous end, and therefore some new modus operandi in the world and Church must be sought. Thus we see 1854 as the beginning of the popes as global teachers, a notion well described by the irreplaceable studies of Eamon Duffy and Owen Chadwick.

It would, of course, be too much of a stretch, especially in a short lecture, to suggest there is a direct route between 1854 and 2016, but I did sketch out enough evidence, I thought, to indicate some highly probable links between the 1854 definition, the 1950 definition of the Assumption by another pope named Pius, and also the burgeoning papacy commenting on everything under the sun and inserting itself into all manner of thing well and truly beyond its brief. This problem began with Pius IX in 1854, increased under Leo XIII, and then became more and more acute with every pope from him to the current incumbent of the Roman bishopric who seems to have missed all the warnings in the Apophthegmata Patrum about the importance of bridling one's tongue lest that organ become a σκάνδαλον to the brethren.

Then, for effect on a hot summer evening after three days of a conference, I threw in some spicy bits at the end calling for an overhaul of the papacy to prevent any future popes not only from proceeding with unilateral dogmatic definitions, but also from hosting flying press conferences, having Twitter accounts, giving interviews to anyone for any reason about any topic, and much else besides. I concluded with an especially bon mot from Adrian Fortescue, the English priest-scholar and Orientalist whose views on the papacy were much more acerbic, and much more polemically conveyed, than anything I have ever done in, e.g., my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy. (It seems a great pity that many of his choicest phrases are to be found in his correspondence, very little of which seems to have been published except in excerpts here and there--as in Aidan Nichols intellectual biography, The Latin Clerk: The Life, Work and Travels of Adrian Fortescue.)

Writing--note well--in 1920, Fortescue, a stout defender of the papacy and Church in other contexts, was forced to admit, “I wish to goodness that the pope would never speak at all except when he means to define ex cathedra. Then we should know where we are.”

To which let all the weary brethren say: Amen, Amen!