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 alclass="underline" ‘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’.
The main feature of this neo-Thomist thought was that it rejected any idea of evolution, of change. It looked back, beyond the twelfth century, to Aristotle, to the idea of timeless truth as affirmed by scholastic thought. After Aeterni Patris bishops were ordered to appoint as teachers and priests only men who had been instructed in ‘the wisdom of St Thomas’.68 At every turn, their aim was to show that the new sciences, when in conflict with revealed doctrine, were in fact ‘erroneous’. This was ‘papal infallibility’ in action but, in addition, the doctrine of magisterium was also reintroduced and redefined. It was enforced by what Lester Kurtz says was the most far-reaching change – the attempt to make the Gregorian University, the most important university in the Catholic world, a major centre for Thomistic studies. Crucial appointments were made, to change the balance of power within the university, to ensure that it conformed to the new papal orthodoxy. The Curia was more concerned than ever with perpetuating old ideas, understood as still sufficient, rather than discovering new ones.69
As if all this were not enough, in 1893 Leo issued Providentissimus Deus, which aimed to contain the new scholarship regarding the Bible. This edict argued, more than thirty years after Darwin, and nearly sixty years after Strauss and Lyell, that ‘a profitable understanding of sacred writings’ could not be achieved by way of the ‘earthly sciences’. Wisdom comes from above, reiterated the edict, and of course on these matters the pope was infallible. The papal document dismissed the charge that the Bible contained forgeries and falsehoods and pointed out that science was ‘so far from the final truth that they [the scientists] are perpetually modifying and supplementing it’.70
Yet another way to stifle debate on biblical matters came in the form of a Biblical Commission, which Leo appointed in 1902. In an apostolic letter Vigilantiae, he announced that the commission would be made up of men of learning whose duty was to interpret the divine text in a manner ‘demanded by our times’ and that this interpretation would henceforth ‘be shielded not only from every breath of error, but also from every temerarious [reckless] opinion’.71 Leo’s final attempt to stem the tide was his apostolic letter Testem benevolentiae, which denounced ‘Americanism’ as heresy. This extraordinary move reflected the inherent conflict between democracy and monarchy and the views of some conservative Catholics in Europe, who thought that the American Catholic elite were guilty of undermining the Church through their support of ‘liberals, evolutionists . . . and by talking forever of liberty, of respect for the individual, of initiative, of natural virtues, of sympathy for our age’.72 In Testem benevolentiae, the pope declared his ‘affection’ for the American people but his main aim was to ‘point out certain things which are to be avoided and corrected’. He said that efforts to adapt Catholicism to the modern world were doomed to failure because ‘the Catholic faith is not a philosophical theory that human beings can elaborate, but a divine deposit that is to be faithfully guarded and infallibly declared’. He likewise insisted on the fundamental difference between religious authority and political authority: the church’s authority came from God and could not be questioned, whereas political authority comes from the people.73