Many historians maintain that the Concordat of 1801 was as important an event for the modern church as the conversion of Constantine had been for the ancient church. As Constantine had first recognized and then established Christianity in the Roman Empire, so a series of concordats and other less-formal agreements created the modus vivendi between the church and modern secular society. What this arrangement entailed for the papacy was the surrender of most of the temporal holdings of the church in Europe. The eventual outcome was the creation of Vatican City as a distinct political entity, but only after a long conflict over the States of the Church during the unification of Italy in 1869–70.
Although the Concordat of 1801 was of lasting significance, it was not the final act in the tumultuous drama involving Napoleon and the pope. Indeed, the French ruler attached a number of articles to the concordat that restricted papal jurisdiction in France, thus undermining the authority of the pope. Pius’s refusal to accept the additions to the agreement led to worsening tensions between the two leaders and to Pius’s eventual arrest and imprisonment. In January 1813, while in French custody, Pius was forced to sign a new concordat, but he repudiated the document two months later.
Pius ultimately outlasted Napoleon, who suffered his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, after which the victorious powers attempted to restore the pre-Revolutionary order. The Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 helped to establish a basis for the church’s recovery in the 19th century by returning Rome to the pope. Pius further secured the church’s future by signing concordats with the rulers of several countries, and he recognized the newly independent states of Latin America. He also revived the Society of Jesus, condemned Freemasonry, and patronized art and education. His efforts restored the papacy to its former position of respect and reestablished the church as an important force in the affairs of Europe and America. Pius IX
Few popes of modern times have presided over so momentous a series of decisions and actions as Pius IX (reigned 1846–78), whose early liberalism was ended by the shock of the Revolutions of 1848. During his reign the development of the modern papacy reached a climax with the triumph of ultramontanism—the viewpoint of those who favoured strong papal authority and the centralization of the church—and the promulgation of the dogma of papal infallibility. It had long been taught that the church, as “the pillar and bulwark of the truth,” could not fall away from the truth of divine revelation and therefore was “indefectible” or even “infallible.” Inerrancy had likewise been claimed for the Bible by both Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians. As the visible head of the church and as the authorized custodian of the Bible, the pope had also been thought to possess a special gift of the Holy Spirit, enabling him to speak definitively on faith and morals. But this gift had not been defined in a clear way. The outward conflicts of the church with the modern world and the inner development of its theology converged in the doctrinal constitution Pastor aeternus (“Eternal Shepherd”), promulgated by the First Vatican Council (commonly called Vatican I) on July 18, 1870. It asserted that
Pius IX.Felici/M. Grimoldi
the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when in discharge of the office of pastor and teacher 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 to him in blessed Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed.
Those who opposed the official declaration of papal infallibility argued that such a declaration would widen divisions within the church and increase animosity and misunderstanding between the church and the modern world. This opposition was, however, ineffective, and the dogma of infallibility became the public doctrine of the church. Those who continued to disagree with the dogma withdrew to form the Old Catholic Church, which was centred in the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland.
In September 1870, while Vatican I was in recess, Rome was occupied by forces of the Kingdom of Italy, and the council was forced to suspend its work. During the subsequent period of the “Roman Question,” which lasted until 1929, the official position of the church was that the pope was a “prisoner” in the Vatican.
Even before the promulgation of the dogma of infallibility, Pope Pius had exercised the authority that it conferred on him. In 1854 he defined as official teaching the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, “that the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, at the first instant of her conception, was preserved immaculate from all stain of original sin, by the singular grace and privilege of the Omnipotent God, in virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ.” Although the doctrine was very popular in an age of increasing Marian devotion and was supported by bishops and theologians, it was pronounced by the pope as a demonstration of papal infallibility. Ten years later Pius issued a document that was in some ways even more controversial, the Syllabus (December 8, 1864). In it he condemned various doctrines and trends characteristic of modern times, including pantheism, socialism, civil marriage, secular education, and religious indifferentism. By thus appearing to put the church on the side of reaction against liberalism, science, democracy, and tolerance, the Syllabus seemed to signal a retreat by the church from the modern world. Be that as it may, the document did clarify Roman Catholic teaching at a time when it was being threatened on all sides.
The church’s hostility toward modern thought and society led to a serious confrontation with the Prussian government in the Kulturkampf of the 1870s and ’80s. Because he was a Prussian and a Protestant, Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck resisted the basic trend of the developments just traced. In his view, the Roman Catholic parties in the German states were an obstacle to the political union to which he was dedicated—i.e., a predominantly Protestant Germany without Roman Catholic Austria. Moreover, he believed that both the Syllabus of Errors and the dogma of infallibility were expressions of the church’s opposition to the very sort of state he was trying to establish. Much of the theological opposition to papal infallibility came from German thinkers, notably Ignaz von Döllinger, to whose defense Bismarck sprang.
The Kulturkampf began with the elimination of the Roman Catholic bureau from the ministry of education and ecclesiastical affairs in the Prussian state. Bismarck asserted the state’s authority over all education in Prussia and expelled the Society of Jesus. Then, in direct defiance of the Syllabus of Errors, he made civil marriage obligatory, regardless of whether the couple had exchanged vows before a clergyman. Laws were passed to compel candidates for the Roman Catholic priesthood to attend a German university for at least three years. Bismarck summarized his defiance of the church in an allusion to the conflict between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV in the 11th century: “We are not going to Canossa!” When Pius IX died in 1878, the conflict was still unresolved. Leo XIII