Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (46 page)

By 1861, Vittorio had managed to deprive the Pope of all his territories save Rome itself. The juggernaut of the new Italy brought in secular laws affecting education, marriage contracts, property ownership, press freedom, as well as modern communications, and popular franchise. Pio reacted with sadness and anger. In his
Syllabus of Errors
, published in 1864 as an adjunct to the new encyclical of that year,
Quanta Cura
, Pio denounced the unstoppable social and political realities all around him by denouncing eighty ‘modern’ propositions, including socialism and rationalism. In the eightieth proposition, a cover-all denunciation, he declared it a grave error to assert that the ‘Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself with progress, liberalism, and modern civilisation’. Four years later he would attempt to ban Catholics from voting in elections.

As Pio, and those who sympathised with him, saw it, temporal and spiritual powers were now in a life and death struggle with aggressive man-centred

ideologies that had been gathering impetus across Europe ever since the French Revolution. And the enemy was to be found even within the Church itself. Bishops, especially in France, had attempted to undermine papal authority with calls for more local discretion.

Pio now attempted to retrieve what had been lost in terms of temporal power by urging the notion of papal infallibility and the exercise of centralised power. Despite the bad press he continued to receive in the secular domain, there were many within the Church, ready to support and encourage him. As the historian the late H. Daniel-Rops has put it, Pius IX became the centre of an ultramontane cult. ‘[His] personality … was undeniably responsible for a great deal of the fervour he aroused. All were struck by his charm, his affability, the noble simplicity of his welcome and that sense of humour which seldom deserted him even in his darkest hour. The exaltation of the papacy was the triumph of a man as much as, if not more than, of a doctrine.’
³
The world would know where the Pope stood by the ratification of a dogma, a fiat, to be held by all Catholics under pain of excommunication. The setting for the deliberations that preceded the proclamation would be a great council of the Church, a meeting of all the bishops capable of making the journey to Rome: the Vatican Council of 1870.

Back in England, Archbishop Manning, along with W. G. Ward, now editor of the
Dublin Review
, had supported and encouraged Pio every step of the way. Indeed Manning may well have encouraged the Pope towards an extreme definition of a dogma of papal infallibility, to be applied to all of his official utterances. For Manning the question was now bigger than the issue of the pope’s temporal power, there were bigger fish to be basted as the challenge of the new biological sciences sank in across Europe. In response to Darwin’s theory of evolution, Manning asserted that ‘an internecine conflict is at hand between the army of dogma and the united hosts of heresy, indifferentism and atheism’. Dogma must confront science, Manning declared, which traces ‘mankind to a progenitor among the least graceful and most grotesque of creatures, and affirms that thought is phosphorous, the soul a name for the complex of nerves, and, if I rightly understand its mysteries, that our moral sense is a secretion of sugar’.
⁴
Papal dogma was the antidote that would confirm Catholics in their faith while withstanding the spread of atheism, secularism, and evolutionary science.

On the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, 1867, Manning made a joint vow with Bishop Senestrey of Ratisbon (Regensburg) to lobby the bishops in the forth-coming Council to push through the proclamation of the Pope’s infallibility. Those bishops who responded to Manning’s and Senestrey’s call were to be known as the infallibilists. Yet there was one Frenchman, Bishop Dupanloup of Orleans, who was vociferous for the ‘inopportunists’ – those who called not only

for sensible limits to any dogmatic of papal infallibility, but for a delay.

Newman’s view, already expounded in the
Apologia
, was that a dogma of papal infallibility could not involve new doctrine: it would only serve to clarify which areas of authority in the Church were protected from error. He suggested to the arch infallibilist W. G. Ward that a doctrine of papal infallibility was only ‘likely to be true’ rather than actually be true. Which was like telling Ward that the Pope was only ‘likely’ to be a Catholic. The Pope was infallible, Newman believed, in so far as he was head of a Church that was infallible. And he was on the side of the inopportunists in that he believed a dogma of papal infallibility would cause anxiety among Catholics and antagonism among non-Catholics. He also saw the campaign for a dogma as a further tendency towards Roman centralisation. He would write in June 1870, ‘I certainly think this agitation of the Pope’s Infallibility most unfortunate and ill-advised, and I shall think so even if the Council decrees it, unless I am obliged to believe that the Holy Ghost protects the Fathers from all inexpedient acts, (which I do not see is any where promised) as well as guides them into all the truth, as He certainly does. There are truths which are inexpedient.’
5

Writing to a clerical friend, Canon Malcom MacColl, he summed up the problem of fideism:

To take up at once … [a new] article [of faith] may be the act of a vigorous faith, but it may also be the act of a man who will believe anything because he believes nothing, and is ready to profess whatever his ecclesiastical, that is his political, party requires of him. There are too many high ecclesiastics in Italy and England, who think that to believe is as easy as to obey – that is, they talk as if they did not know what an act of faith is. A German who hesitates may have more of the real spirit of faith than an Italian who swallows.
6

Writing to Richard Wegg-Prosser in 1851, Newman had expressed his understanding of the importance of papal infallibility as a gate to Catholic belief, and as a blank wall:

Suppose a man planted himself against the
walls
of Rome and declared he would not go round to one of the
gates
– for he had a fancy to enter the city at that particular point. Equally unreasonable is it, to attempt to become a Catholic
through
one particular doctrine … There
are
persons who have found Papal Infallibility to be the gate; let them, if they will … However, to you and to me, Papal Infallibility is
not
a proof.
I
say, Very well, go to that which
is
a proof …

Newman goes on to ‘bring out his meaning’:

I conceive that the fundamental proof of Catholicism (i.e. the basis according to
my
conception of Catholicism) is the promise that the Primitive church shall continue to the end, the likeness of the (Roman) Catholic church to the Primitive, and the dissimilarity

of every other body – the (Roman) Catholic church then, being proved to be the organ of revelation, or infallible in matters of faith, will
teach
the Pope’s Infallibility, as far as it is doctrine, just as it teaches the Divinity of our Lord …
7

In conclusion he declares that ‘to
defend
the church’s doctrines, when she is proved to be the divine
oracle
, is a very different thing from
proving
those doctrines nakedly by themselves’.

In advance of the Council, Newman was invited by Rome to become an official ‘consultor’ on one of the groups or commissions that prepare Conciliar sessions and debates. At the same time, Bishop Dupanloup asked him to be his
peritus
, or theological adviser. He declined both invitations, pleading ill-health. Yet he still attempted to influence events from afar. The Council opened on 8 December 1869, and Newman wrote on 28 January to Bishop Ullathorne, now in Rome, ‘one of the most passionate and confidential letters’ he had ever written in his life:

Rome [he pleaded] ought to be a name to lighten the heart at all times, and a Council’s proper office is, when some great heresy or other evil impends, to inspire the faithful with hope and confidence; but now we have the greatest meeting which has ever been, and that at Rome, infusing into us by the accredited organs of Rome and its partizans (such as the Civiltà, the Armonia, the Univers, and the Tablet) little else than fear and dismay … What have we done to be treated, as the faithful never were treated before? When has definition of doctrine de fide been a luxury of devotion and not a stern painful necessity? Why should an aggressive insolent faction be allowed to make the heart of the just to mourn, whom the Lord hath not made sorrowful?
8

The letter was private but Ullathorne passed it around, and it was accordingly copied and published in full in the
Standard
newspaper. It would do Newman no favours among Manning’s faction, although it would remain a counsel of good sense for subsequent generations of Catholics.

At the outset, only one half of the bishops attending were disposed to support a dogma of papal infallibility. There was strong opposition from some of the bishops of the great Sees of the world. When Cardinal Guido of Bologna protested that only the assembled bishops of the Church could claim to be witnesses to the tradition of doctrine, the Pope replied: ‘Witnesses of tradition?
I
am the tradition.’ In the course of the debates the extremist position was forced to give way, and a carefully worded, substantially moderated document was eventually agreed.

The historic dogma was finally passed on 18 July 1870 by 433 bishops, with only two against. The definition reads:

The Roman Pontiff, when he speaks
ex cathedra
, that is, when, exercising the office of pastor and teacher of all Christians, he defines … a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, through the divine assistance promised to him

in St Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer wished His church to be endowed … and therefore such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church.
9

During the hour of the great decision, a storm broke over St Peter’s dome and a thunderclap, amplified within the basilica’s cavernous interior, shattered a pane of glass in the tall windows. According to
The Times
(London), the anti-infallibilists saw in the event a portent of divine disapproval. Archbishop Manning responded disdainfully: ‘They forgot Sinai and the Ten Command-ments.’ Manning also came close to what Newman would have deemed theological blasphemy by declaring the definition a ‘triumph of dogma over history’. With both the moderates and the extremists claiming victory, it was the turn of the secular world to react to this belated boost to papal authority. Before the Council could turn to other crucial matters, such as a doctrine of the Church, a universal catechism of Christian doctrine, and a code of Canon Law, the French troops protecting the Eternal City pulled out to defend Paris in the Franco-Prussian War. In came the soldiers of the Italian state, and Rome was lost to the papacy for a second time in twenty years, this time forever. All that remained to Pio and his Curia was the 108.7 acres of the present-day Vatican City, and that on the sufferance of the new Italian nation-state. Shutting himself inside the apostolic palace, Pio refused to come to an accord with the new

Italy.

In the period that followed the First Vatican Council, many of Pio’s worst fears were realised. In Italy, processions and outdoor services were banned, communities of religious dispersed, Church property confiscated, priests con-scripted into the army. A catalogue of measures understandably deemed anti-Catholic by the Holy See, streamed from the new capital: divorce legislation, secularization of the schools, the banning of numerous holy days. In Germany, partly in response to the ‘divisive’ dogma of infallibility, Bismarck initiated the
Kulturkampf
, the culture struggle against Catholicism. Religious instruction came under state control and religious orders were forbidden to teach; the Jesuits were banished; seminaries subjected to state interference; Church property fell under the control of lay committees; civil marriage was introduced in Prussia. Bishops and clergy resisting
Kulturkampf
legislation were fined, imprisoned, exiled.