Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

A fatal mistake in the Vatican’s approach, which ran through all these edicts and condemnations, was the church’s characterisation of its critics as a conspiratorial group, intent on undermining the hierarchy while pretending to be its friend.⁶⁰ This underestimated and at the same time patronised the opposition. The real enemy of the Vatican was the very nature of authority in the new intellectual climate. The papacy insisted throughout on its traditional authority, its historical, apostolic succession.⁶¹ These ideas were carried to their extreme in the doctrine of papal infallibility, which was declared for the first time by the First Vatican Council in 1870. Nineteenth-century Catholicism was similar in many ways to twelfth-century Catholicism, not least in the fact that it was dominated by two long pontificates, those of Pius IX (1846–1878) and his successor, Leo XIII (1878–1903). Amazingly, at a time when democracies and republics were being formed on all sides across the world, these two popes sought to resurrect monarchical theories of governance, both within and outside the church. In his encyclical

Quanto conficiamur, Pius IX looked back as far as Unam sanctam, the papal bull issued by Boniface VIII in 1302 (see above, Chapter 16). In other words, he was seeking to resurrect the medieval notion of absolute papal supremacy. In Testem benevolentiae, his attack on Americanism, Leo XIII ruled out any hope of democracy for the Church, arguing that only absolute authority could safeguard against heresy.⁶²

In these circumstances, and with the papal states compromised by the Italian desire for independence and unification, anticlericalism deepened in Italy. This was one of the important background factors to Pope Pius IX’s apostolic letter which called for the First General Council of the Vatican.⁶³ Political turmoil meant that the council very nearly didn’t get off the ground. When it did, it faced the problem of re-establishing the hierarchy of the church and in attempting to do this it produced two famous statements. The first was this: ‘The Church of Christ is not a community of equals in which all the faithful have the same rights.’ Instead, some are given ‘the power from God . . . to sanctify, teach and govern’. And second, the most famous statement of all: ‘We teach and define that it is a dogma divinely revealed: that the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when in discharge of the office of Pastor and Doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the Universal Church, by the divine assistance promised him in Blessed Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the divine redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith or morals.’⁶⁴

And so the doctrine of papal infallibility became an article of faith for Catholics for the first time.⁶⁵ This was highly risky and had been resisted since at least the fourteenth century. The Vatican may have felt that, with the great travel and communications revolutions of the nineteenth century, it would be able to exert its authority more effectively than in the Middle Ages and this may explain why, in addition to papal infallibility, Leo XIII issued Aeterni Patris in 1879 in which he singled out St Thomas Aquinas to be the dominant guide in modern Catholic thought. This, like Pius’ edict Quanto conficiamur

, involved a return to pre-Enlightenment, pre-Reformation, pre-Renaissance thinking of the Middle Ages. Scholastic theology was notable for being pre-scientific, for being a speculative exercise, inside people’s heads, an attempt to marry Christianity and other forms of thought, and noted for its cleverness rather than a truthfulness that could be widely agreed upon.⁶⁶ In effect, Catholic thought was again becoming a closed and self-referential circular system, mainly in the hands of Jesuit theologians. The most influential of these were grouped around Civiltà cattolica, a journal created in 1849 at the behest of the pope, as a response to the events of 1848.⁶⁷ These Thomists (of whom Gioachino Pecci, bishop of Perugia, later Leo XIII, was a leading figure) were implacably opposed to developments in modern thought. Modern ideas should be rejected, they insisted, ‘without exception’.