THE FIRST V ATICAN COUNCIL

by E. E. Y. HALES

ENTEN ARIES are supposed to be occasions when we take

C stock of the event we are commemorating. In the light of

developments in the last hundred years how does the work
o f the First Vatican Cow1cillook today? And since it so happens
that the hw1dred years in question includes the Second Vatican
Council, recently concluded, it is natural to put the question in
this form: how does the work ofVatican I look today, in thelight
o f Vatican 11?
I think it would be fair to say that it is widely considered that
the work ofVatican I was a little unfortunate, and has since proved
embarrassing, because its definitions enhanced the authority of the
papacy. Vatican 11 is supposed to have helped to redress that
balance by disclosing the nature of the Church as a whole, from
the bishops down to the People of God, oi: perhaps I should
say from the bishops up to the People of God, in view of our
preference nowadays for turning everything upside down. Such
critics ofVatican I are not, of course, denying either the dogmatic
infallibility or the juridical primacy of the Pope, which were
defined at that Council; but they are saying that it is a distortion
to stress the powers o f the papacy and to neglect the powers of the
college of bishops or the rights of the rest o f the Church, and they
are saying that the one-sided defmitions of Vatican I tended to
create such distortion in men's minds w1til they were balanced
by the pronouncements of Vatican 11.
There is a good deal about Vatican I about which we feel a little
uncomfortable today. The preoccupation of that Council with the
papal power seems to us now to reflect the attitude of an age when
monarchy still mattered; our own democratic age prefers to place
the emphasis rather differently. Again, to this ecwnenical age, the
definitions ofVatican I appear inopportune because they alarmed
the non-Catholic world and upset sensitive people to an
12 329 CCA
 E. E. Y. HALES

unnecessary extent. Much was said by critics at the time and has
been written since about the arrogant and absolutist temper of a
majority of the bishops, and especially of the Pope, Pius IX, in
1869-70. We are led to believe that it is really justas well that the
Franco-Prussian war, which broke out in July 1870, and the rtalian
occupation of Rome, which followed as a consequence of that
war, brought the Council to an end after it had lasted for only
seven months. Had it continued to sit, it would have gone on to
tackle the wider problems of the Church as a whole, and in parti-
cular the relations between Church and State, which were on its
agenda, and would have done so in an intransigent spirit; so we
are told we may see the finger of God in the armies of Bismarck
and K.ing Victor Emmanuel that cut short its work. r do not mean
that those who express such views consider that any lasting harm
was done by Vatican r, but rather that the achievement of
Vatican r left us with a lop-sided and much too ultramontane
attitude towards the Church, and that the temper of that As-
sembly made it unsuited to tackling those wider problems which
havesince been tackled withsuch vision and wisdom by Vatican H.
These judgements of Vatican r seem to me to be too patron-
izing and too complacent; nor are they quite consistent. And they
assume a wisdom in the Second Vatican Council anda rash and
ill-balanced impetuosity in the First which I do not think is fair to
the First and may be over-flattering to the Second.
But let me concede, at the outset, one important point that
lends substance to the criticisrns of the work ofVatican I. It is this,
that amongst the Minority at that Council, who were opposed to
its defining the papal primacy and the papal infallibility, were to
be found some o f the ablest and most high-minded of the bishops
present, such as Dupanloup o f Orleans, Darboy of Paris, o r Ketteler
of Mainz, as well as some of the most intelligent of its scholars,
such as Mgr Maret of the Sorbonne o r the German historian o f the
Councils, Hefele of Rothenburg. I say nothing of distinguished
critics outside the Councillike Acton or Newman, who were also
opposed. It should however be noted that what these critics were
opposed to was the defining of these matters; they were not saying
that the Pope did not possess these powers. They believed in the
330
 The First Vatican Council
infallibility of the Church, resting on the promises of Christ, and
that the Pope was supreme Head of the Church. But some ofthem,
like Dupanloup, felt that it was very difficult to say when the
Pope spoke infallibly, and therefore wiser not to try to doso; and
others of them. like Darboy, or Ketteler, or Newman, felt that it
was inopportune for the Council to do so; it might heighten the
extravagances of fanatics and it might have an unfortunate effect
on what today we call ecumenical understanding-it is noteworthy
that most of the bishops of this Minority, who opposed the
definitions, came from countries of mixed religion, where the
Catholic Church was in a minority or at least, as in France,
strongly challenged.
lt seems to me that, although it is true that the definition of the
papal primacy :and the papal infallibility at Vatican I did make a
very poor impression on the world at large, yet in the long run,
after people had had time to consider matters soberly, they did not
prove so disastrous. You cannot define without limiting, and
because the Council defmed the area within which the Pope was
infallible it limited that area. And let us never forget that already
in 1869 it had become extremely important to make it clear how
very limited that area was, because the wildest things were already
being said by fanatics about the Pope's absolutism and his in-
fallibility. There existed already a strong neo-ultramontane ten-
dency to accord sometimes grotesque and quasi-divine attributes
to the Pope; it was less easy to do this after 1870 than it had been
before because the Council had made it perfeccly clear that hardly
anything popes say is to be regarded as infallible. Catholics badly
needed to be reminded o f this in I 869, just as they still need to be
reminded of it in 1969. The terms in which the defmitions were
drawn up in 1870 helped to remind them. And they still help to
remind us. Thus it is because of the terms of those defmitions that
we can confidently say that Humanae Vitae is not an infallible docu-
ment. I suspect that if this encyclical had been issued in the
eighteen-sixties it would have been regarded by the ultramontane
party, and especially by Louis Veuillot of the Univers and W. G.
W ard of the Dublin Review, as infallible. That sort o f misconce~
tion became impossible after Vatican L
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 E. E. Y. HALES

Vatican I then limited because it defined the papal prerogatives.

I sometimes wonder whether Vatican II, when it carne to treat of
the powers and characteristics of the rest of the Church in its
decree Lumen Gentium, did so with as keen an eye to the practical
implications of what it was talking about as was shown by the men
of Vatican I. I am not, of course, questioning the truth or the
wisdom o r the value o f Lumen Gentium, which undoubtedly con-
stitutes a breakthrough and gives us a uniquely valuable picture
of the nature of the Church as a whole. But the danger seems to
exist that it may remain just that-a picture. How is the Church
to be made to work in accordance with this admirable picture of
what it is? Nobody seems quite to know, and everybody in this
country is arguing about it from the columns of The Times and the
Tablet downw.ards, or upwards; and the discussion is at least as
lively in other countries. Cardinal Suenens tells us that it was a
defect in the work of Vatican H that it failed to show how the
concept of episcopal collegiality was to be made to work, as an
effective power, in conjunction with the Papacy and the Curia.
Surely it was. You can, if you like, say that the fault rests with
Vatican I, for having defined the papal prerogatives in such a way
as to make it very difficult for Vatican II to create, alongside those
prerogatives, a viable collegiate power; but it seems to me you
can only say that if you mean that Vatican I defined the papal
prerogatives falsely. Even the most ardent liberal-progressive (if
I m.ay use emotive words) is not suggesting that. So it seems to me
that the onus r.ested with Vatican H to show more precisely how
the episcopal collegiality by which it set such store was to work.
Bishop Butler has said in the Tablet, and the editor of The Times
has followed him in saying, that a grave issue confronts the
Church, namely how to give effect to Vatican Il's teaching on
collegiality; it certainly seems to me a pity that that Council did
not show how it was to be done-as, for instance, the Council of
Trent, which was so much preoccupied with heresy, showed how
heresy was to be combated by the reorganization of seminary
education.
However, I do not want to draw too many direct comparisons
between Vatican I and Vatican II, which is not the purpose of
332
 The First Vatican Council
this paper. My main purpose ís only to defend the work of
Vatican I against the criticisms of those who have grown up in the
heady atmosphere of Vatican II and who conceive that Vatican I
led us astray. I don' t think that, by tackling the matter of the
papal authority, Vatican I distracted our attention from what
matters even more, namely the Church as a whole; I think that it
dealt with an isolated matter, ofvery great importance, which was
the burning issue of that day in the Church, and dealt with it in
a judicial and a practical way.
It would be hard to fmd circumstances in recent history more
different than those in which these two councils met. In 1869, the
prime objective, as at the Council of Trent, was to stop the rot
(I speak here in Catholic terms) that was undermining the Church
both from within and from without. In 1962 the prime objective
was exactly the opposite, namely to bring the Church into closer
rapport with the world, by renewing her interior life, and by
extending her embrace to ali elements in the modem world with
which any fruitful contact could be made. It follows that at
Vatican I, as at Trent, anathemas were the natural order of the day,
whereas at Vatican ll anathemas were themselves anathema.
'There have been enough anathemas', said Pope Jolm.
The contrast extends, too, to the circumstances in which the
two Councils assembled. 1962 was a year of relative détente in the
struggle between the Church and the world, with a marked thaw
in the icy hostility behind the iron curtain, and a sympathetic
interest in what the Church was ali about wonderfully awakened
by Pope John. By contrast, I 869 was a year when a largely hostile
world saw with satisfaction the Pope losing his temporal dominion
and widely assumed he would lose his spiritual dominion along
with it. Even an important part of the Catholic world, especially
in the more democratic and advanced countries, had been turned
against Rome by the provocative issue of the Pope's Syllabus oj
Errors in 1864, which appeared to condemn as erroneous most of
the principies cherished by democrats everywhere.
It seemed almost incredible, when in 1867 the Pope first
announced his proposal to hold a General Council, that he should
contemplate summoning some 900 bishops to Rome at a time
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 E. E. Y. HALES

when he only survived in that city thanks to the French army,

which Napoleon m was always threatening to withdraw. lt has
occasionally been said that he only summoned the Council in
order to oblige the French army to stay at Rome to protect it.
Fortunately the truth is rather different; his foreign policy was by
this time entirely in the hands of his able Secretary of State,
Cardinal Antonelli, who was strongly opposed to the summoning
of the Council because he did not want to offend the French
government, and the French government, like ali other govern-
ments, was opposed to the idea.
Why were all governments, Catholic and Protestant alike,
opposed? Why, indeed, were they interested? Nothing demon-
strates more clearly the change in the public position of the Church
between the two Vatican Councils than the intense interest of
governments, and of the French, British, Austrian, and Bavarian
govemments in particular, in the work of Vatican I, and the
benevolent indifference o f governments to the work ofVatican li.
It bears wimess to the de facto (and beneficiai) separation of Church
from State in the twentieth century, which had come about
although the Syllabus of Errors said it was an error to say the two
should be separated. And why were the governments so hostile
in r 869, especially the Catholic governments of Austria and Bavaria
which made serious efforts to prevent a Cow1cil from being held?
Why did that good Catholic, Lord Acton, use his influence with
his friend Gladstone to try to get the British government to join
with other governments to prevent the Council from discussing
dangerous topics-which Gladstone might have done had he not
been dissuaded by another ofhis friends, Cardinal Manning? Why
did the French bishops, Dupanloup and Darboy, try to get
Napoleon m to interfere-something he, too, might well have
done, had he not been dissuaded by his Premier, Emile Ollivier,
who was a Protestant? The Council was saved by the fact that the
Protestant Príme Minister of England and the Protestant Premier
of France decided it was wiser not to stop it. It was in greatest
danger from the Catholic President of the Council of Ministers
in Bavaria, Prince Hohenlohe, and the Protestant Chancellor
Beust, of the Catholic Empire of Austria.
334
 The First Vatican Council
The reason for this hostility on the part of the governrnents was
the issue by Rome of the Syllabus ofErrors in December r864. The
shadow of that Syllabus hung heavy over the CoWicil because it
was widely supposed (and not without reason) that the Roman
intention behind the sununons of the Council was to give dog-
matic force to the Syllabus. And the particular items amongst the
eighty propositions of the Syllabus that gave rise to special alarm
were those which reasserted the ancient claims of the Church in
her centuries-old argument with the State. Thus the Syllabus, as
we have seen, said it was an error to say that Church and State
should be separated ('A free Church in a free State' was the
phrase used by Cavour in Italy and by the Catholic liberal Monta-
lembert in France); it was an erro r to say that all Christian Churches
should be put on an equal footing by the State; it was an error to
say that democratic majorities were free to do whatever they
liked, irrespective of the rights of the Church-for instance in the
field of marriage and education or the life of religious com-
mWiities. The whole was summed up in a phrase that has become
notorious, the eightieth and final proposition of the Syllabus,
which stated that it was an error to say that the Pope should come
to terms with progress, liberalism, and modem civilization.
Governments were alarmed by this Syllabus, and by the idea
of a CoWicil that might reinforce it, for two main reasons. They
thought a Council might approve a Constitution on the rights of
Church and State, conceived in the terms of the Syllabus, which
would then become binding on Catholics everywhere and create
immense difficulties for those governments which had many
Catholic subjects. And they thought a CoWicil might define the
papal prerogatives in terms which would enable the Pope to
count on the support of Catholics everywhere in his disputes with
their governments and would effectively undermine their alle-
giance to those governments (and we may note that not only
governments but bishops feared the likelihood of increased papal
interference).
These were not idle fears. These things could have happened. A
large number ofthe bishops at Vatican I would have liked to seethem
happen, and so would a great number of the faithful throughout
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 E. E. Y. HALES

the world whose enthusiasm was roused by journalists like

Louis Veuillot and W. G. Ward. If the eighteen-fifties and -sixties
were a time o f scepticism among many intellectuals, they were also
years o f revival in religious faith and especially in the transcenden-
tal and miraculous element in religious faith (witness the progress
of our own Oxford Movement) and there were plenty of people
who, while they might not pine, as did W. G. Ward, to have
a fresh papal buli to read every morning with their breakfast, yet
were firmly convinced that it was only by papal bulls that the
world would be saved. Moreover, it was not only the semi-popular
Catholic press that invoked these dangerous ideas. The official
organ of the Jesuits at Rome, the Civiltà Cattolica, was saying that
it hoped the Council would proceed to give dogmatic force to the
Syllabus. It also said it hoped the Council would declare the Pope
infallible by acclamation; there was no need, the paper said, for the
Council to debate this matter o r to count heads; the Holy Ghost
had no need to wait upon a debate; the Holy Ghost would descend
upon the Assembly, like the tongues of fire at Pentecost, enabling
it with a loud voice to proclaim the Pope infallible. Infallible
wheo? In alllús utterances? lt seemed so.
Those were heady days. Better transport was making possible
the holding of enormous Catholic congresses, and while some of
the higher-level ones, like the famous congress of 1863 at Malines,
where Montalembert made his great appeal for a free Church in
a free State, refl.ected a liberal temper, and even foreshadowed the
spirit of Vatican 11, most of these great assemblies displayed a
mounting devotion to the Pope, often expressed in extravagant
terms. Meanwhile the Pope himself was adopting policies which
were having the effect o f centralizing the Church upon R o me. He
was encouraging the bishops to make visits to Rome, ad limina; he
was enlarging the ranks of the Monsignori-a papal appointment.
He was encouraging the adoption everywhere of Roman rites,
Roman vestments, the Roman liturgy.
By the !ater eighteen-sixties popular fanaticism about the Pope
was being played upon by the journalists (and again one must give
pride of place to Louis Veuillot), and leading to an emotional
demand that th.e Pope be declared infallible by a General Council.
336
 The Fírst Vatican Council
Not only govemments but liberal and moderately minded Catho-
lics everywhere were alarmed by this movement. For we have to
remember that the fanatical neo-ultramontanes, as they are now
called, enormously outnumbered the so-called liberal-Catholic
movement. Montalembert's paper, the liberal Correspondant, was
only a monthly, with a circulation of a mere 3,000 copies;
Veuillot's Univers was the daily paper read by the French-reading
parish priests, forming their outlook, and through them the
outlook of the public at large, to the grief and concem of some of
the French bishops, but to the satisfaction of more of them. W e
read, today, the protests of Lord Acton, or Dollinger, or Monta-
lembert, who were demanding freedom from Roman inter-
ference for criticai scholarship and a proper independence for local
churches from the Curia, and we envisage a liberal-Catholic
movement comparable to that which rallied behind PopeJohn and
the majority of the bishops at Vatican li. There was nothing of
the kind. Montalembert was the most distinguished and the most
disinterested champion whom the Church had in the nineteenth
century; but by the time the Council was getting down to its
infallibility debates, in the spring of the year r 870, his had beco me
a voice crying in the wildemess. In despair, he protested, in his
last writing, that the ultramontanes at Rome were 'offering up
justice and truth, reason and history as a holocaust to the idoi they
are erecting at the Vatican'. Pius IX didn't like that very much.
He preferred the Civiltà Cattolica, which was now saying that the
liberal-Catholics were not true Catholics.
'The idol they are erecting at the Vatican.' Well, some of them
were trying to erect an idol. It had become de mode to refer to
Pius IX as Pius the Great. No Pope had ever been the recipient of
such vast assemblies of bishops and clergy and laity at Ro me as
were arriving in the eighteen-sixties, even before the Council
itselfbrought the unprecedented number of 900 bishops in 1869.
No less than 500 bishops attended the ceremonies for the eighteenth
centenary of the martyrdom of Saints Peter and Paul on 29 June
1867, as well as 20,000 priests. At the canonization of the Japanese
martyrs in 1862 there were 400 priests and roo,ooo of the faithful.
This was something quite new and, while we need not doubt that
337
 E. E. Y. BALES

these crowds were filled with a true religious fervour, we should

also note the beginning of papal publicity on a modern scale
familiar to anybody who has attended a public papal audience.
The Pope himself was glad to see them, and he was always a
charming host; but at the time of the Council, when he domiciled
many of the poorer bishops at his own expense, he remarked
wryly: 'Non so se il Papa uscirà di questo Concilio fallibile od
infallibile; ma questo e certo che sara fallito' ('I don't know
whether the Pope will emerge from this Council fallible or in-
fallible; but he wiU certainly be bankrupt').
The emotional build-up which, by the time the Council had
been sitting for three months, seemed likely to result in its
erecting an idol in the Vatican and declaring him infallible by
acclamation, owed a great deal to the personality of Pius. He
could be outrageous, as when he dedared, to those who invoked
the tradition of the Church that he himself was the Tradition
('la tradizione sono io!') o r when h e said that liberal Catholics
were not true Catholics. But he said everything with a smile, and
they loved him for it. And his behaviour was, in truth, a tour de
force. How could he be so irrepressible after ali that he had
suffered, and the Church in Italy had suffered, at the hands of
the Italian Risorgimento? The sheer audacity of his intransigence
carried its own appeal. To tell the world, in the eighteen-sixties,
that it was an error to say that the Pope should reconcile himself
with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization required real
courage. To hold a General Council at Rome in 1869-70, with
the enemy literally at the gates of the city, required even more.
To fasten public attention on the divine authority of the Church
when everybody was saying that authority belonged to the People
took men's breath away. I think that Pius IX's intransigence had
much to do with his popular appeal, in much the same way as
the uncompromising claims of Newman and Pusey kindled the
devotion and self-sacrifice of the Oxford Movement.
But by the year 1869 the neo-ultramontane movement was
becoming irresponsible and dangerous. It was wrong to say that
the Pope was infallible by virtue of some sort of personal in-
spiration, a direct light from heaven-a most dangerous view,
338
 The First Vatican Council
this-and it was absurd to say that his every utterance was infallibly
true. There was a romantic dement in ali this, very characteristic
of the nineteenth century. Yet before we dismiss the neo-
ultramontan:ism of the eighteen-sixties as an altogether unhealthy
excrescence, and give praise to Vatican I for putting it in its place
(which is what I propose to do), we ought to remember that
ultramontanism in the nineteenth century represented a necessary
reaction against the appallingly low status to which the papacy had
sunk in the eighteenth century, when even good popes, like
Benedict XIV, thought of themselves as polite brothers-in-arms
of the other enlightened despots, courtly princes preoccupied with
the problems of their own states, and fighting, rather lethargically,
a losing batde, outside Italy, for the rights of the Church. When
Clement XIV suppressed the Jesuits in 1773, he betrayed the
mission of the papacy because he did the deed to appease the
governments of his time. Neo-ultramontanism was bom when
Pius VI resisted the French revolution and Pius VIT resisted Napo-
leon and when Lamennais and Montalembert resisted Louis-
Philippe. It was both useful and necessary; but by the end of the
eighteen-sixties, with the Syllabus, with Veuillot, with the Jesuits
of the Civiltà Cattolica, with the mass demonstrations at R orne and
elsewhere, it was getting out of hand.
The great merit of Vatican I was that, despite the emotional
pressures from within as well as from without, it arrived at well-
balanced defmitions that were the outcome of genuine and full
debate, were in accordance with the tradition of the Church, and
were ultimately accepted by ali the bishops, and gave rise to no
appreciable schismatic movement save the limited Old Catholic
revolt in Germany, whose members followed Dõllinger, a leader
who was already estranged from Rome before the Council started.
And although the mere fact that it did declare the pronouncements
of the Pope, under certain special and rare conditions, to be in-
fallible, senta frisson of horror through Europe, adding impetus to
anti-clericalism in France or to Bismarck's Kulturkampf in Ger-
many, yet within a decade the crisis had passed, some of the steam
had been taken out of the extravagances of the ultramontane
movement, and men had learnt to live with the new definitions.
339
 E. E. Y. RALES

Let us look briefly at what the Council achieved in the brief

seven months that it survived. It was not wholly preoccupied with
the papal prerogatives. In its Constitution Dei Filius it isolated and
anathematized some of the popular current heresies-notably
rationalism, pantheism, and naturalism, affirming over against
them the Catholic teaching on God, on Revelation, and on Faith.
What is worth noting about this is that whereas the Council of
Trent, in the sixteenth century, had been concerned with identi-
fying and condemning erroneous interpretations of Christianity,
Vatican I was concerned with identifying and condemning non-
Christian beliefs which had emerged during the enlightenment of
the eighteenth century. In other words the Church was no longer
fighting against Luther and Calvin: it was fighting against
Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists. But we must not delay over
the Council's work on the contemporary heresies because the
Council itself did not do so. It was in a hurry to get on to the
matter of the papal prerogatives, because it was being pressed to
doso by the ultramontane party, and the Pope himself was begin-
ning, understandably, to show an impatient interest in the topic.
So by March 1870 the Council turned its attention away from
heresies and towards the papacy, taking the subject out of its turn
from a schema that was concerned with the Church as a whole.
So began the struggle on the floor of the Council between the
ultramontane or Majority party, organized by Archbishop Man-
ning ofWestrninster. and the liberal or Minority party, organized
by Bishop Dupanloup of Orleans. In some respects it was a little
disedifying. One regrets, for example, the sharp practice of
Manning, in packing with his own friends the important Deputa-
tion (or committee) de fide, which considered amendments to the
schemata. One regrets the efforts of the Minority, behind the scenes,
to persuade their governments to intervene and stop the work of
the Council. One regrets the fact that Pius IX abandoned his
neutral position and made it increasingly clear to everybody that
he wanted a pronouncement that endorsed the concept of papal
infallibility. But the ímportant point, in the long run, was that the
definitions, as they finally emerged, were a compromise, the
result of a debate; and while they clearly expressed the juridical
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 The First Vatican Council
primacy o f the Pope, and his dogmatic infallibility, they did so
in terms that lirnited both concepts.
The defmition of the pope's juridical primacy was the more
sweeping of the two although, in effect, it only repeated the
definition Laetentur Coeli reached at the Council of Florence in
1439. It affinned the full and supreme jurisdiction of the Pope over
the universal Church, and specifically anathematized anyone who
said that the Pope had only the principal part but not the full
plenitude of this supreme power, or that his universal power was
not ordinary and immediate but exceptional. Some o f the bishops
were rather worried because they thought this might be taken to
imply that their own ordinary and immediate jurisdiction, in
their own dioceses, was only delegated to them by the Pope rather
than coming direct to them from God; but in fact the Council was
careful not to say that the power of the bishops carne to them from
the Pope. Thus at one and the same time the Council safeguarded
the rights ofbishops and yet killed finally the old Gallican tradition
that the Pope had no ordinary jurídica! or administrative powers
in certain countries, for instance France. His jurisdiction was
universal.
Papal Infallibility proved more difficult to define than did the
Primacy of the Pope. The final defmition o f it read:
The Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is when, exercising
the office of pastor and teacher of ali Christians, he defines with his
supreme apostolic authority a doctrine conceming faith or morais to
be held by the Universal Church, is possessed, through the divine
assistance promised to him in St Peter, of that infallibility with which
the divine Redeemer willed his Church to be endowed in defining
doctrinc conceming faith and morais: and therefore such definitions of
the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves and not from the
consent of the Church.
We should note the following points:
First, what a long way this definition is from being a pronounce-
ment 'by acclamation', o r from being one which makes the Pope
infallible whenever he happens to feel inspired. So far as I know the
only occasion since 1870 on which the Pope has spoken infallibly,
in the sense that Vatican I defined the matter, was when Pius XII
341
 E. E. Y. RALES

in 1950 defined the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin

Mary into Heaven.
Second, there is a sting in the tail of the definition, in the last
words: 'and therefore such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are
irreformable of themselves and not from the consent of the
Church'. (These words were added after the General Congrega-
tion had passed the text of the decree on 13 July; the Deputation
de .fide adde,d them on 14 July and the General Congregation
passed the amendment on 16 July. The Public Session and final
vote were on 18 July.) The words mean that papal definitions do
not require the formally expressed consent of the bishops; the
words should not be taken to mean that the Pope has no need to
take the advice of theologians, bishops, or other advisers, or that
he is acting as other than head of, and therefore a part of, the
Church.
Third, the decree Pastor Aeternus, which embraced these defini-
tions of the primacy and the infallibility, was passed, at the final
session of the Council, by 53 3 votes to 2, the two being the Bishop
o f Cajazzo, in Sicily, and the Bishop of Little Rock, in Arkansas.
But many of the Minority had left Rome by then, led by Dupan-
loup, rather than remain and vote against the known wishes of
the Pope. At the General Congregation which approved Pastor
Aeternus as a whole, on 13 July, the voting was 451 placet, 88
t~on-placet, 62 placet juxta modum.
Fourth, the Minority bishops mostly made the outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian war the excuse for their departure. Ali but a
handful of them immediately wrote to the Pope expressing their
acceptance of the defmition, as fmally adopted, and they had all
done this before the end of the year 1872. If the Council did not
achieve moral unanirnity in the same measure as Vatican li did, it
certainly expressed itself through the mouth of a large majority,
and the minority yielded with a good grace after the event.
A word is necessary on the deplorable public relations aspect of
Vatican I, an aspect in which a great improvement was effected at
Vatican li. I know that the press and information departments at
Vatican 11 carne in for criticism; but at Vatican I no reliable news
at ali could be obtained most of the time; commentators depended
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for their information upon gossip and naturally preferred sensa-
tional gossip. The bishops at Vatican I took seriously their pledges
o f secrecy, and therefore failed to reply to the devastating attacks
that were made by men like Acton or Dõllinger, who conveyed
the impression that the Council was fraudulent and intended to
set up the despotism of a clique at Rome. Fortunately several of
the bishops kept diaries, which later became the basis for inter-
esting books, notably Bishop Ullathorne of Birmingham, whose
diary became the basis for Abbot Butler's Vatican Council (pub-
lished in 1930, now available as a Fontana paperback and the best
account in English of the Council). But such books were only
published much later. For thirty years the hostile press held the
field, so that Bismarck in Germany and Gladstone in England had
no difficulty in persuading a great proportion of their countrymen
that the etfect of the Council would be to make Catholics un-
reliable subjects. Yet all that had really happened was that the
bishops had defined where, within the Church, authority ulti-
mately lay, and, as Manning put it, in his reply to Gladstone, the
decrees o f the Council had 'in no jot or tittle changed either the
obligations or the conditions of civil allegiance'.
But the rumours of fearful goings-on at Rome continued to
circulate. And when the Vatican did at last allow the documents to
be studied it gave them to a Jesuit historian, Father Granderath,
who wrote an excellent five volumes on the subject, but was
naturally suspected ofhaving suppressed what was unpalatable to
Rome. Only in the year 1927 did the full documentation become
generally available in the Mansi records of the Councils. This
secrecy was very bad policy and was wisely abandoned at Vatican 11.
This contrast between the public relations of the two Councils
reflects the utterly ditferent atmosphere that carne to prevail at
Rome after the accession of Pope John. As I have said earlier,
Vatican I was still defying and censuring the world, in the best
traditional Roman manner, whereas Vatican II was moving out-
wards to meet the world. Pope John ushered in Vatican ll with
a note of optimism, castigating the 'prophets of doom'. This
volte-face in the Roman attitude (because it was no less) was
certainly timely and most welcome. But I don't think it was
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a turning of the back on the work of Vatican I; it was rather

a turning of the back on neo-ultramontanism-curialism if you
like-which survived Vatican I and was still evident during the
reigns of the twentieth-century popes. This intransigent ultra-
montanism, of a triumphalist and dangerous kind, certainly
existed at Rome in 1870; but it was not allowed to get into the
decrees of the Council, which were well drawn up, soundly based,
and expressed with moderation.
It is fitting, in condusion, to notice the high regard that Pope
John so often expressed for Pius IX and for the work ofVatican I.
He hoped he might be able to canonize Pius IX, whose Cause had
been entered long previously-while Vatican II was sitting. 'I am
always thinking', he wrote in his Journal, 'ofPius IX, of saintly
and glorious memory; and, imitating him in his sacrifices, I would
like to be worthy of celebrating his canonization.' W ell, he died
too soon to have the chance of doing that. He also died too soon
to see the outcome of his own Council, on which all his hopes
were centred. Had he lived, one wonders whether he would have
allowed that Council to be concluded without making proper
provision of the means by which the bishops were to be enabled to
play their proper part in a collegially controlled Church, of the
means by which the Curia was to be kept in its proper place.
However that may be, it is certain that Pope John did not see the
decrees on the papal prerogatives promulgated by Vatican I as an
obstacle to the development of responsible episcopal collegiality.
Nor need they be. The real danger resides in the tendency, ali too
evident amongst Catholics over the last 150 years, to want to erect
what Montalembert called an idol in the Vatican; and there is
nothing in the decrees of Vatican I that warrants so irrational
a procedure as the erecting of any idols anywhere.

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