How the Bad Guys Won

Abstract

How the Bad Guys Won Peter Heinegg Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church. By John W. O'Malley, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 307 pp. $24.95 Needless to say, the urbane, scholarly, serenely judicious Father O'Malley (now 91, a professor emeritus at Georgetown University, and perhaps best known for his Trent: What Happened at the Council, 2013) would never use the crude colloquialism “bad guys.” But his precise, immaculate account of the events leading up to the official definition of papal infallibility by Pius IX (1792‐1878) in the “Dogmatic Constitution” Pastor Aeternus (1870) shows that this was more than a dreadful theological‐philosophical mistake. It was the signal triumph of a period of deeply conservative Vatican ideology and control that would continue until at least the Second Vatican Council (1962‐1965) and is still far from over. The now canonized reactionary Pius X (1835‐1914) waged war, most notably in his blasts (e.g., in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, 1907) against the secular hydra‐heresy he called “modernism”: any attempt to make any changes in church tradition (doctrine, liturgy, biblical interpretation), the kind of concessions to the Enlightenment that Pio Nono assailed in his ferocious‐ludicrous catalog Syllabus of Errors (1864). Vatican II reversed or qualified some features of this anti‐intellectual piety, but strains of it could still be found in the reigns (that telling term!) of Paul VI (1963‐1978), who famously condemned “artificial” contraception in 1968, and John Paul II (1978‐2005) and Benedict XVI (2005‐2013), who made life miserable for proponents of liberation theology and other innovative thinkers. For liberals like O'Malley, the more than a century and a half from Pius IX up until Pope Francis must seem like a long series of missed opportunities for real reforms in the overclericalized, overcentralized, and overdogmatized Roman Catholic Church. To be fair, there have been some promising moments, as in 1943 when Pius XII, silent about the Nazis, put in a good word, in Divino Afflante Spiritu, for “Wissenschaft”: the mostly Protestant‐devised contemporary methods of scriptural explication. On the other hand, the horrific revelations of priestly pedophilia—acts typically concealed under the aegis of unchallenged church authority—have made it increasingly hard to have an optimistic view of the twenty‐first‐century R.C.C. O'Malley knows all this, but barely adverts to it, sticking to his position of fair‐minded ecclesiastical historian. He begins by noting the irony that the major impulse for defining papal primacy and infallibility came, not from prelates, but from conservative Catholic laymen like the powerful, zealous journalist Louis Veuillot (1819‐1883), who saw it as a way to block the spread of post‐French‐Revolutionary culture. And before Veuillot and Co., there had been the influence of the far more gifted Joseph de Maistre (1753‐1821), whose On the Pope (1819) is still considered a classic of nineteenth‐century French literature. The Church in Pius’ day was beleaguered by anticlerical regimes in France, Italy, and Germany, but the same time it witnessed a Romantic resurgence in Catholic sentiment, as seen in all sorts of medieval revivals, personal conversions, and crucially, from O'Malley's perspective, edifying books like Chateaubriand's The Genius of Christianity, or the Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion (1802), a kind of grand aesthetic apotheosis, glorifying the Catholic faith and its artistic splendors. The book was hailed as a masterpiece, though nowadays it's often disdained by critics as showy and superficial. In any case, Catholics were building churches, going on pilgrimages, and praying in public with old‐fashioned fervor. Skeptics and unbelievers may have been ruling academia and making the headlines, and they are certainly better remembered today than the religious apologists they attacked; but southern Europe was still a very Catholic continent, as seen in the visions of Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes (1858) and the cult of the Immaculate Conception, which was formally endorsed by Pius IX in the apostolic constitution Ineffabilis Deus (1854). This was the first time an individual pope had ever defined an article of faith (repeated in 1950, when another passionate Mariolater, Pius XII, declared that Mary “was...