Vatican Council I: Its Political and Religious Setting

Abstract

Almost exactly three hundred years after the last session at the Council of Trent and some fifteen centuries since the faithful had gathered at Nicaea, Pope Pius IX, with all the pageantry and ritual befitting the solemnity of the occasion, opened the first general Vatican council on December 8, 1869. The twentieth such convocation in the history of the church, it was called at a time when the church once again felt threatened. Since 1789 political, social, economic, and intellectual changes had spawned forces and ideologies hostile to the church's position. New national states, born of war and revolution, claimed the complete allegiance of their people. Liberal concepts of freedom of thought and education, of worship and conscience, of the press and association conflicted with the church's traditional responsibility for the moral, spiritual, and educational welfare of Catholics. The changing character of economic life, accompanied by technological advances, was creating a society whose goals and ideals were wholly secular. The progress of scientific thought and its influence on other fields of scholarship emphasized the conflict between secular learning and the church. By 1869 a serious crisis had arisen. The church's domain, both religious and temporal, was being whittled away, and there was dissent among Catholics as to how the church should meet the challenges of the century. The first year in the pontificate of Pope Pius IX1 hardly presaged the bitterness and disillusionment of its last two decades. His election in June 1846 had seemed to open a new era for the church. The year 1847 was a particularly happy one. At its beginning, Ozanam perhaps