The First Vatican Council (8 December 1869-20 September 1870/5 June 1960) was the twentieth ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. It was convened by Blessed Pius IX and suspended prematurely when Napoleon III was captured during the Franco-Prussian War and the French troops protecting Rome left the city, leaving the remnants of the Papal States open to capture by the newly formed Kingdom of Italy. Nevertheless, it managed to promulgate two dogmatic constitutions: Dei Filius on the Catholic Faith (24 April 1870) and Pastor Aeternus on the Church of Christ.
In this interview, Shaun Blanchard discusses Vatican I and recommends some books about it and its wider history.
Five Books for Catholics may receive a commission from qualifyng purchases made using the affliate links in this post.
Pius XI convoked the council in the bull Aeterni Patris. The goals outlined there are broad and generic. However, he expressed his intention to convoke a council two days before the publication of the Syllabus of Errors (1864) and consulted the cardinals of the Roman Curia about its opportuneness and possible agenda. What were the specific reasons for convening Vatican I? There was a general sense of crisis in the nineteenth-century Church, a sense that the Church was under siege from various -isms external to it: capital L liberalism, nationalism, and rationalism. This was Pius IX's initial reason for convening the Council.
However, Pius IX was also concerned about internal enemies. They only came to the surface later, when the attention shifts to a particular set of ecclesiological questions.
At face value, the First Vatican Council is Pius IX's attempt to boldly— perhaps even aggressively—assert what he sees as the right Catholic vision for entering a hostile modernity.
Many assume that ecumenism began in the twentieth century and was only sanctioned by Vatican II. However, Pius IX also invited the Eastern bishops not in communion with Rome to the council (Brief Arcano divinae providentiae) and addressed a brief to Protestants (Iam vos omnes). Was there a serious ecumenical drive behind the first Vatican council? Pius IX certainly saw himself as the father and teacher of all Christians. So, he would have seen these Christians as separated brethren. However, we would now regard his attitude as quite triumphalist.
His attitude was that they were welcome to renounce their errors and return to the bosom of the Church. However, he did not have a strong sense of the need for dialogue with separated Christians. Some of his gestures were irenic and he did have a real desire to overcome division, but his attitude was not ecumenical in the modern sense.
That does not mean there were not any Catholics who were thinking ecumenically. There was a proto-ecumenism as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
What was the preparatory work of the Council? The theologians who were the fathers of the First Vatican Council—in the way that we might see Congar, de Lubac, and Ratzinger as the fathers of the Second Vatican Council—were those of Roman School.
This was a fascinating group of thinkers, mainly Italians and Germans.
Giovanni Perrone SJ was probably the most important one. He was the dean of the Roman School. The Society of Jesus had been suppressed in the 1770s and restored in 1814. The Jesuits came back on the scene with a lot of vigour in the nineteenth-century.
Another important figure was Carlo Passaglia.
Some, such as Johann Adam Möhler, were from the Tübingen School in Germany. He retrieved the vision of the Church as the mystical body of Christ. Of course, everyone accepted this as a New Testament teaching. However, tentative steps to rethink ecclesiology along more patristic and biblical lines were beginning to be taken, while avoiding the pitfalls of Protestantism or Jansenism. Not everyone agreed on how to express these truths. Nevertheless, these were real attempts at ressourcement.
The Roman School Theologians were certainly ultramontane. They stuck very closely to a tradition of papal encyclicals and helped to form these encyclicals. However, they were not narrowly Neo-scholastic but had a very eclectic approach. They were suffused in the Church Fathers and Scripture.
Was Vatican I in part a response to the aftermath of the French Revolution and the rise of liberalism in the nineteenth century? Yes, the First Vatican Council was certainly a Catholic attempt, a papal attempt, to chart a new path, following the destruction of the Ancien Regime.
There were Catholics who believed that nineteenth-century liberalism, and maybe even the early stage of the French Revolution, had many positive elements. However, for Pius IX and Gioacchino Pecci, the future Leo XIII, the French Revolution was a catastrophe that had spawned a new and entirely negative way of thinking about society, philosophy, and politics.
Paradoxically, these two were forward-looking, modernizing thinkers in certain ways. The First Vatican Council was an attempt to meet the challenges of modernity, partly by going back, partly by thinking innovatively about being the Church in a new era.
Nicaea, the first ecumenical council, was convoked by Constantine. Vatican I was the first council to which the Catholic princes were not invited. How come? This ties in with the previous question. The French Revolution had changed European society profoundly.
However, Pius IX was an innovator. He was charting a new path. For good reason, he held that the “crowned heads of Europe,” the democratic governments, and the republics no longer offered a Christian vision for society, or at least not one to which he could subscribe
Sometimes, the secular rulers would undertake actions that were beneficial to the Church. For example, French troops were guarding Rome at the time. The Papal States fell definitively to the army of the Kingdom of Italy because the Franco-Prussian War broke out and Napoleon III had to withdraw the French troops who were protecting the Vatican.
It is not that there was no positive cooperation whatsoever. However, the Ancien Regime, the old order and way of doing things, had been broken definitively.
In the run-up to the Council of Trent, there had been a back-and-forth between the Holy Roman Emperor and Pope Paul III about where the council should be held and under what conditions. By the time of Vatican I, that kind of dialogue was no longer vital in any meaningful way.
On one hand, that was scary. It provoked much rethinking and reshuffling. However, it also presented an opportunity. Specifically, it presented the opportunity for there to be a powerful pope who could act as the direct pastor of all Christians in a way that, ironically, had not been possible under the Ancien Regime.
Catholic princes or their envoys may not have been present at Vatican I. Nevertheless, did any European nations exert political pressure in an attempt to steer or influence the council? Yes, the governments of Europe were very interested in the proceedings of the First Vatican Council.
There is a lot of great scholarship on this.
Many German bishops were very nervous about a potential definition of papal infallibility. They feared a backlash from anti-Catholic Prussia.
Similarly, in Great Britain there was concern that anti-Catholic forces within the United Kingdom would be able to resurrect the old canards about papal authority.
Hence, the governments of Europe were watching Vatican I very intently. News about it was spreading very quickly.
There was a media presence at the council, though certainly not to the extent that there was at Vatican II. There were journalists and newspaper reports. Some very colourful accounts spread around Europe about the debates, potential dogmatic statements, and the policies. Governments were very concerned about these.
The see of earlier ecumenical councils held in Rome was the cathedral, St. John Lateran. Why was this council held in St. Peter’s? By the nineteenth century, St. Peter's had become the symbol of papal authority. It was the Mother Church of Christendom. This symbolized in a more direct way the transfer of the pope’s role as Patriarch of the West to that of the supreme pastor of the entire Christian world.
There may have also been practical reasons for holding it in St. Peter’s rather than St. John Lateran.
Normally, a small group of theologians and bishops exerts a decisive influence on the deliberations and decisions of an ecumenical council. Who were the leading figures at Vatican I? Youh have already mentioned some of the theologians. Who were the leading figures among the bishops at Vatican I? Generally, the bishops were divided into three groups when it came to the question of papal authority.
Some bishops were in favour of a definition of papal infallibility. Among the most important members of that group were Cardinal Manning, the archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cullen, the archbishop of Dublin, Ignatius von Senestrey, the bishop of Regensburg, and the future Cardinal Pie, the bishop of Poitiers and a relator at the council.
Then there was a much smaller but intellectually eminent group of bishops, many French, who were opposed to the definition of papal infallibility.
This second group can be divided into two: those who disagreed in principle with it and those who simply believed that, for whatever reason, it was inopportune to define papal infallibility as a dogma.
Some of the most important opponents of a definition were Josip Juraj Strossmayer, bishop of Bosnia and Syrmia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Félix Dupanloup, bishop of Orléans, and Georges Darboy, Archbishop of Paris.
Other important figures were not present at the council but their thought was well known. John Henry Newman was invited as a peritus, a theological expert, for Archbishop Ullathorne of Birmingham, but declined the invitation.
"Dei Filius has stood the test of time."
The first dogmatic constitution, Dei Filius, is on the Catholic faith. Its four chapters are on: 1) God, the creator of all things; 2) Revelation; 3) faith; 4) faith and reason. What are the main teachings of Dei Filius? Dei Filius promotes a positive vision, but also censures and condemns certain ideas. It condemns fideism, the belief that knowledge about God is simply a matter of faith, without reason being involved. However, its main targets are the rising secularism and rationalism. Rationalism is the secular belief that all reality is explicable through reason.
The positive teaching is that we should be neither rationalists nor fideists but hold faith and reason together.
Dei Filius asserts strongly that we can know God through reason from the natural order. This was very important in the age of Darwin, when the secular vision of science was growing: the idea that religion is outdated because science can explain the world completely.
Dei Filius has stood the test of time. With its strong emphasis on the compatibility of faith and reason, its teaching will be familiar and second nature to Thomists or those schooled in John Paul II's encyclical Fides et Ratio. Apart from this general emphasis on faith and reason, it also teaches—and some might find this in need of greater explanation—that we can know God from the natural order through reason alone and do not necessarily need Revelation to conclude that there is one God, who is good, punishes the evil, and rewards the good.
One dogmatic definition of Dei Filius regards rationalism in the human or historical rather than the natural sciences: the books of Sacred Scripture, in their entirety and all their parts, are divinely inspired. Was Dei Filius taking aim at the rise of historico-critical methods in theology? It certainly was. The drafters of Dei Filius were aware of attempts to “demythologise” Scripture. They guarded jealously the concept that God is revealed not only in nature, but also in divine Revelation, Scripture, and Tradition. Hence, Dei Filius insists strongly on the inspiration of Sacred Scripture.
The debate did not have the same specificity as the modernist one, which took place thirty years later. Nor was there anyone as popular as Alfred Loisy around. Nevertheless, the drafters of Dei Filius understood that in no previous ecumenical council had the divine authority of Scripture been undercut as it was in the modern world.
Dei Filius was revisited in Vatican II’s dogmatic constitution on divine Revelation, Dei Verbum. Many would argue that the latter complements and completes the former. How so? Dei Verbum is a deeper and richer explanation of what the Church believes about divine Revelation. It is concerned with the same problems as Dei Filius but also a wider range of ones.
In keeping with ressourcement and the style that John XXIII set for Vatican II, it gives a deeper, more positive, biblical, and patristic explication of what the Church believes. It is less concerned with condemning errors. Implicitly, however, it rules out all kinds of things.
It makes the brilliant move of grounding the authority of Scripture and Tradition explicitly in the person of Jesus. It thereby deepens Vatican I’s dogmatic constitution Dei Filiius.
There is also a return to the Council of Trent’s “unreal controversy” - to quote Joseph Ratzinger - the debate with Protestantism about the quantitative fullness of Scripture and Tradition (the infamous “partim-partim” debate). Rather, the fullness of Revelation is accomplished through the person of Jesus Christ. This subjective, personalist perspective complements Dei Filius, with its insistence on the objectivity and authority of Scripture and Tradition, and the knowability of God through faith and reason. Dei Verbum reiterates these teachings but grounds them, with a personalist move, in Jesus, the fullness of Revelation. We know about God’s full Revelation of himself through two trustworthy means that are intertwined with one another: Scripture and the Church’s Tradition.
The second dogmatic constitution, Pastor Aeternus, is on the Church of Christ. For all its merits and undeniable importance, its treatment of the matter is very partial. Each of its four chapters is centred on just one aspect of the Church: the primacy of Peter and his successors. Did Vatican I intend to offer a more complete treatment or is this one of the reasons Vatican II made the Church its main point of business? Vatican I did intend a provide a fuller treatment of the Church. Originally, Pastor Aeternus was just one section of a larger document on the Church. However, the council was interrupted by the Risorgimento. Napoleon III withdrew the French troops from Romedue to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. The forces of the Kingdom of Italy were able to invade Rome and Vatican I was suspended. The first act of Vatican II was to formally close Vatican I.
Nevertheless, it is fair to say that there was a lopsided emphasis on the papal office, an ultramontanism that troubled many of the bishops at the time. At Vatican II, there was certainly an explicit attempt to balance this picture of the Church as the mystical body. The visible centre of unityis the successor of Peter. His role is irreplaceable. However, he is but one part of a larger body.
1.
What makes your first recommended book, John O'Malley, SJ’s Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church, a good history of Pius IX’s council? It is an excellent introduction to the events of the First Vatican Council. The council came out of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution; a series of philosophical, cultural, and political changes that occurred in Europe between 1820 and 1870; the rise of the ultramontane movement. O’Malley’s book does an excellent job at setting the scene for the council and situating it within its historical context.
This post is for paying subscribers only
Sign up now and upgrade your account to read the post and get access to the full library of posts for paying subscribers only.
