Rome Against the Modern World

Looking over the mountains

The French Revolution and Napoleon had humiliated the papacy (see Revolution and the Church). But in an unexpected way they strengthened it. National churches, once controlled by kings, lost their protectors. Many Catholics concluded that the only safe anchor in a stormy world was the pope. This movement was called Ultramontanism, from Latin for "beyond the mountains," meaning looking south across the Alps to Rome. It favored a strong, centralized papacy, Roman liturgy and devotions, and resistance to liberal states. Its opposite, the belief that national churches should keep independence from Rome, was called Gallicanism in France.

The 19th century was also a time of intense popular Catholic piety: devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, rosaries, pilgrimages, new religious orders (especially women's teaching and nursing congregations, which grew enormously), and apparitions of Mary. In 1858 a poor peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous Soubirous, reported eighteen visions of a lady at a grotto in Lourdes in the Pyrenees. The lady called herself "the Immaculate Conception." Lourdes became one of the world's greatest pilgrimage sites, with millions seeking healing.

Pius IX: from liberal to conservative

Pius IX (Pio Nono, pope 1846–1878) began his reign as a reputed liberal. He freed political prisoners and introduced reforms in the Papal States. Then came the revolutions of 1848. In Rome, his prime minister was assassinated and a republic was proclaimed. Pius fled in disguise and returned in 1850 only with the help of French troops. The experience turned him decisively against liberalism, nationalism and democracy.

His long reign of 32 years, the longest in papal history after Peter's traditional one, was marked by two major themes:

The Immaculate Conception (1854)

Pius defined, on his own authority after consulting the bishops, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception: that Mary, from the first moment of her conception, was preserved free from original sin by God's grace in view of Christ's merits. This had been debated for centuries; Aquinas had doubted it and Duns Scotus defended it. Defining it as dogma by the pope alone was a demonstration of papal authority.

The Syllabus of Errors (1864)

In 1864 Pius published the Syllabus of Errors, a list of 80 propositions he condemned. They included pantheism, rationalism, socialism, freedom of religion, separation of church and state, and civil marriage. The famous final error was the idea that "the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization." Liberals everywhere were outraged. Catholic liberals, like Bishop Dupanloup of Orléans, tried to soften its meaning. For decades the Syllabus stood as a symbol of the church's rejection of the modern world.

The First Vatican Council

In December 1869 Pius opened the First Vatican Council in St Peter's, the first general council since Trent three centuries earlier. About 700 bishops attended. The most controversial question was whether to define Papal infallibility.

Many bishops, especially from Germany, Austria and France, and some leading Catholic thinkers, opposed defining it. Some thought it was historically false. Others thought it was true but that defining it would be "inopportune," creating needless barriers to Protestants and fueling hostility from governments. The English convert John Henry Newman privately lamented the aggressive "insolent and aggressive faction" pushing for it. Pius strongly supported the definition. When a cardinal argued that it needed support from tradition, Pius reportedly replied: "Tradition? I am the tradition!" The story may be exaggerated.

On 18 July 1870, during a violent thunderstorm, the council approved the constitution Pastor Aeternus by 533 votes to 2. About 60 opposing bishops had left Rome the day before rather than vote no. It declared:

• The pope has full, supreme and immediate jurisdiction over the whole church.
• When the pope speaks ex cathedra ("from the chair"), that is, when as supreme teacher he defines a doctrine on faith or morals to be held by the whole church, he is preserved from error by divine assistance. Such definitions are "irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the church."

Infallibility is often misunderstood. It does not mean the pope is sinless or always right, or that every papal statement is infallible. Only formal ex cathedra definitions qualify, and since 1870 it has been formally used only once: the definition of Mary's bodily Assumption into heaven in 1950. All the opposing bishops eventually submitted. Some German Catholics, led by the historian Ignaz Ignaz von Döllinger, refused, and they formed the small "Old Catholic" church.

The modern papacy, 1800–1965

The loss of Rome

The day after infallibility was defined, France declared war on Prussia. French troops protecting Rome were withdrawn. On 20 September 1870 the army of the new Kingdom of Italy, unified by Giuseppe Garibaldi and King Victor Emmanuel II, broke through Rome's walls. The Papal States, which had existed for over 1,100 years (see Charlemagne), were gone. Rome became Italy's capital. Pius refused to accept this. He declared himself a "prisoner in the Vatican" and forbade Italian Catholics to vote in national elections. Popes did not leave the Vatican for nearly sixty years. The "Roman Question" was settled only in 1929, when Mussolini's government signed the Lateran Treaty, creating the tiny independent state of Vatican City.

In the long run, many historians think the loss of the Papal States was a blessing. Freed from governing territory, the papacy could concentrate on spiritual and moral leadership. Its prestige among Catholics worldwide grew enormously.

Leo XIII: engaging the modern world

Pius's successor, Leo XIII (1878–1903), elected at 67 as a supposed "caretaker," reigned for 25 years and took a more open approach:

• He made Thomas Aquinas the foundation of Catholic philosophy and theology (Aeterni Patris, 1879), launching a revival of Thomism. It gave Catholic thought intellectual confidence.
• He opened the Vatican archives to historians, declaring that the church has nothing to fear from the truth.
• He encouraged French Catholics to accept the Republic (the "Ralliement," 1892).
• He made Newman a cardinal (1879), a sign of openness to his thought.
• He encouraged biblical scholarship, within limits.

Above all, in 1891 he issued Rerum Novarum ("Of New Things") on the condition of industrial workers. It condemned both socialism, which would abolish private property, and unrestrained capitalism, which treated workers as mere tools. It defended private property, but also workers' rights to a just wage sufficient to support a family, to reasonable hours, and to form trade unions. The state had a duty to protect the poor. Rerum Novarum launched modern Catholic social teaching, which shaped Christian Democratic parties, labor movements and later the welfare state in Europe (see Saving Souls and Society).

The Modernist crisis

Around 1900, some Catholic scholars tried to bring the church into dialogue with modern historical criticism and philosophy (see Faith, Science and Liberal Theology). The French priest and biblical scholar Alfred Alfred Loisy argued that doctrines develop historically and that the Gospels contain much that is not literal history. The Irish Jesuit George Tyrrell and others raised similar questions.

Pope Pius X (1903–1914), a pastoral, deeply devout pope who encouraged frequent Communion and allowed children to receive it from about age seven, saw this as a deadly threat. In 1907 he condemned "Modernism" as "the synthesis of all heresies" (encyclical Pascendi). In 1910 all clergy were required to swear an "Anti-Modernist Oath." Loisy and Tyrrell were excommunicated. A network of informers hunted suspected Modernists in seminaries and universities. Critical Catholic scholarship was frozen for decades, until Pius XII cautiously opened biblical studies in 1943 and the Second Vatican Council embraced much of what had once been condemned.

Little ways

Amid these battles, the most influential Catholic of the era may have been an unknown young Carmelite nun. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) entered a convent at fifteen and died of tuberculosis at 24. Her autobiography, Story of a Soul, describing her "little way" of doing small things with great love and of childlike trust in God, became a worldwide bestseller. She was declared a saint in 1925 and a Doctor of the Church in 1997.