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Letter #82, 2022, Wed, July 6: Vatican I[2022-07-06][Engleză]At various times in the history of Christianity, specific theological themes have risen to prominence, only to recede as times and circumstances change, perhaps to return again years, sometimes centuries, later.In 2022, the theme of the role of the Pope in the life and teaching office of the Catholic Church is attracting new scrutiny, after having been a much-discussed topic in the post-Revolutionary, Catholic world of the 19th century and, particularly, the subject of a landmark outcome of The First Vatican Council (1869-70). And of course this role is a central issue in the dialogue with the Orthodox world, as we continue to seek a path that could lead to our eventual full ecclesial reunion. *** The chief outcome of that gathering was Vatican I’s document Pastor Aeternus, in which the doctrine of extraordinary papal (and also conciliar) infallibility was defined. Catholic author and liturgy expert Peter Kwasniewski (Reclaiming our Catholic Birthright, Ministers of Christ, The Road from Hyperpapalism to Catholicism) recently wrote the following article for the increasingly interesting website OnePeterFive.com in which he comments on John W. O’Malley’s careful, fair and scholarly 2018 book, Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). *** O’Malley’s thesis, explains Kwasniewski, is that the Catholic Church in the late 1800s adopted an “ultramontane” view of papal authority. This meant a view in which a Catholic appealed to the authority of the Pope “over” or “across” (“ultra“) “the mountains” (“montane,” in fact, the Alps as viewed from France looking toward Rome), so as always to remain in harmony with Rome, over against centrifugal nationalist ideas in places like France affecting Catholics at that time. Kwasniewski writes: “The new concern was: How can secular forces and revolutionary powers be checked? The answer: by the Pope! The Pope was an indomitable force standing against the rise of injurious secular forces that sought the Church’s extinction.” Thus the stage was set for a new understanding of the Pope’s teaching role — one that Kwasniewski describes as “hyperpapalism” — listening to the Pope on every matter whatsoever. The result of this new understanding, Kwasniewski maintains, is that quite a few statements by the more recent Popes, including Pope Francis, on matters that are not de fide — that is, are not of central, enduring importance to the Catholic faith — are nevertheless being treated as central and decisive, and to be accepted and embraced. This is a cause of considerable concern and confusion among the Catholic faithful at this time. *** The First Vatican Council (“Vatican I”) was the 20th Ecumenical Council of the Church and it opened with about 700 bishops present of the 1,050 eligible to participate on December 8, 1869. The bishops met for several months, issuing just two dogmatic constitutions from among dozens of proposed “schema” on various issues that were never voted on: 1) Dei Filius, a decree on the Catholic faith dealing with faith, reason, and their interrelations; and 2) Pastor Aeternus, which deals with the authority of the Pope. This second decree states that the true successor of St. Peter has full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church; that he has the right of free communication with the pastors of the whole Church and with their flocks; and that his primacy includes the supreme teaching power to which Jesus Christ added the prerogative of papal infallibility, whereby the Pope is preserved free from error when he teaches definitively that a doctrine concerning faith or morals is to be believed by the whole Church. *** The First Vatican Council was never officially dissolved. The bishops went home after voting on the first two decrees, and never returned. Pope Pius IX then adjourned the Council before they came back, on October 20, 1870, just after Rome was invaded and taken over by Piemontese troops, a military action which brought an end to the Papal States. In a sense, when Vatican II was called in 1959, and gathered in October 1962, it was seen by some as a “re-opening” or a “second half” of the “unfinished” Vatican I… *** St. Paul tells us that the Church is not a human institution, though obviously made up of human beings. Despite the humanity of her parts, St. Paul writes, the Church is something “other” in the universe. The Church came into being on the first Good Friday, when Christ died on the Cross, but the Church was formally inaugurated weeks later, on Pentecost, when Christ sent the Holy Spirit, as He had promised He would. St. Paul speaks of all Christians as “members” of Christ, so that with Him, they form one Mystical Body (Cf. 1 Cor 12:12-31; Col 1:18; 2:18-20; Eph. 1:22-23; 3:19; 4:13). In fact, St. Paul tells us, the “mystical body” of Christ, built up and knit together by the Holy Spirit, is a spiritual communion which is ontologically real, initiated and maintained by real acts, what we call “mysteries” or “sacraments”: baptism, confession, communion. Jesus did not “leave us” a Church which is ours, our possession. Rather, He abides with us in… His Church… from which, individually and collectively, His unique light shines forth into the world, from age to age… *** And what St. Paul tells us very clearly is that we hold this unique “light,” this “treasure,” this divine reality which is Christ’s very being, His Holy Spirit, “in earthen vessels, in vessels of clay.” The mystery is this: the treasure — which is the very abiding presence of the person of Christ Himself — is entrusted to vessels which, of themselves, are not worthy at all of holding such a treasure. None of the vessels is worthy — we begin with this (hence we all say, “Lord have mercy” at the beginning of each celebration of the Mass). The vessels are fallible, so, by definition, inclined to misunderstanding, error, and sin. It is the treasure that is sublime, the treasure that is all-holy, eternal, font of light and love. And St. Paul speaks of this treasure, this light which is Christ, almost as if it is a “second” or “new” creation, as if, with the coming into being of the Church, the world has been created all over again. St. Paul writes that, just as the “light shone forth out of the darkness” when God said “Let there be light,” and created the universe, so also God has “shined in our hearts” for one purpose: “To give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Christ Jesus.” Here is what St. Paul says: Second Letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians, 4:5-9 “For we preach not ourselves, but Jesus Christ our Lord: and ourselves your servants through Jesus. For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Christ Jesus. “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency may be of the power of God and not of us. In all things we suffer tribulation: but are not distressed. We are straitened: but are not destitute. We suffer persecution: but are not forsaken. We are cast down: but we perish not.” This is the point: it is indeed most fitting that “we have this treasure in earthen vessels.” It is fitting so that our evident unworthiness not be a factor in any way to distract or detract from the “excellency” — that which “goes beyond,” which “excels,” which is “the highest and best” — the reality of the treasure itself, its goodness, its reliability, its healing, restoring power. And it is to bear this treasure down through all time, and to bear witness to this treasure from the first age to the last of the Church and world, that all the members of the Church are given their authority, from the head to the least of the members. In these times, marked by great uncertainty and much confusion about who we truly are, and what we truly should do, and who we really should be, or become, and who we really should listen to, and who we really should obey, it may be wise for us to go back, all the way to the beginning, to the basic equation at the root of our existence as believers, believers saved by the reality of Christ, by what He did and said and by who He was, and is: “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency may be of the power of God and not of us.” —RM Support the Moynihan Letters Bishop Karl Josef von Hefele and Blessed Pius IX ( photo credit onepeterfive.com) The “Spirit of Vatican One” as a Post-Revolutionary Political Problem (link) July 6, 2022 By Peter Kwasniewski, Ph.D. In his fascinating book Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church,[1] John W. O’Malley details the movements, ideas, personalities, and events that coalesced in the First Vatican Council of 1869–1870. My intention here is not to furnish a complete account, much less to offer a tidy theological “solution,” but rather to highlight points from O’Malley’s intricate narration that we can fruitfully bear in mind as we continue respectfully to discuss the problem of “hyperpapalism.” The Old Paradigm and the Influence of de Maistre In O’Malley’s telling, what was broadly called “Gallicanism” points not so much to something peculiarly French as to a common set of beliefs throughout historic Latin Christendom. No one accepted or taught a Papacy with completely arbitrary and totally unchecked power. Rather than Tradition finding its origin in the Papacy and radiating out from there, it was understood that Tradition existed throughout the Church and found its convergent central focus in the Papacy. From thence the Tradition could be sent out, but only having been already received. It was a two-way street: the Tradition flows into Rome just as the Tradition flowed out from Rome. The revolutionary spirit propelled a dramatic change away from that historic understanding of the Papacy. The new concern was: How can secular forces and revolutionary powers be checked? The answer: by the pope! The pope was an indomitable force standing against the rise of injurious secular forces that sought the Church’s extinction.[2] Enter Joseph de Maistre, who penned the important text Du Pape (1819) which influenced the Ultramontane movement. On other matters, he was a faithful Catholic Counter-Revolutionary and leader against the hubris of Liberalism in Europe. However, he had become disillusioned by any and all checks on power. All power—secular, and therefore also religious—needed to be reduced to one man, who must be empowered to do anything, and no one could question him at all. Eventually de Maistre’s ideas caught on owing to practical need. What de Maistre did not account for was what happens when his unchecked singular power itself becomes the problem. For him, there’s no recourse. The Parties at Vatican I In the mid-nineteenth century, those opposed to an isolated papal infallibility fell into two basic camps. There were the so-called Gallicans, who represented the old paradigm that, while one must hold the Bishop of Rome in the highest possible regard, he should not be viewed as a divine oracle. They saw the pope as a centering point of unity with a unique primacy and teaching authority; but they also saw in local variety something of divine origin, something also constitutive of the nature of the Church. The Church does not reduce to the Bishop of Rome, as if the latter could say “L’Église c’est moi.” Then there were the so-called Liberal Catholics, on board with the Enlightenment and the new ideas of a Liberalism the tenets of which read like a synopsis of American civics: religious liberty, freedom of speech and of the press, republicanism contra monarchy, separation of Church and State. Their agenda was to advance this in the Catholic Church, and they saw the Papacy as a roadblock. Both of these parties opposed, for different reasons, the ultramontanes—determined anti-Liberals[3]—who were pushing for a new conception of papal infallibility. Here we must distinguish explicitly between Gallicanism as a kind of general mindset, according to which there are limits to papal authority, and Gallicanism as a definite theory about what those limits are, as expressed in the Gallican articles of 1682. The former has much to commend it; the latter has been excluded as heretical. We might say that the Gallicans were correct in a broad way although wrong on several definite points, whereas the majority at Vatican I was correct about the several definite points defined in Pastor Aeternus but wrong in the broader sense about how to combat liberalism effectively. The traditional Catholic position is then a combination of the definite articles of ultramontanism (that is, primacy and infallibility) within the general framework represented by the older view, which was also held by those definitely not Gallican in the strict sense, such as John Henry Newman. In any case, the way things turned out was quite a surprise. The papal infallibility party got their definition, and therein thought their defense against Modern Liberalism was secure. As it happened, the Modern Liberal party captured the Papacy and used that ultimate power to force Modern Liberalism on the entire Church.[4] [Note: Kwasniewski is evidently referring to the period since the Second Vatican Council, and evidently to varying degrees in the recent pontificates of Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis.] Today’s traditionalists are akin to the old traditional European party: valuing the Papacy as a servant of Tradition, not as an all-powerful divine oracle of arbitrary personal whims and fancies. They see the Papacy as having elements of a “constitutional monarchy,” where power is set within a texture of principles, precedents, protocols, and promises. Paradoxically, the pope is both an absolute and a constitutional monarch, which no one else can be. He is absolute inasmuch as he is a monarch limited only by divine and natural law; yet that divine law includes within itself a constitution for the society that the pope governs, in a way that the same divine law does not include a constitution for societies governed by a temporal absolute monarch. The Debate over the Definition There had been a preparatory document on ecclesiology that covered far more material than what was eventually approved.[5] Near the end of the schema was the treatment of papal primacy and infallibility, followed by denunciations of religious liberty, separation of Church and State, freedom of the press and speech, and so forth. Now, the non-Liberal bishops had in common a desire to emphasize those doctrines that Liberalism challenged and to anathematize the contrary errors. This numerical majority seemed to think the best “silver bullet” defense against this hydra-like evil was simply to declare papal infallibility, for after all, the pope could be trusted to condemn Liberalism: Roma locuta, causa finita. Apparently it did not occur to them that someone might come along and use the Papacy itself as an advocate for Liberalism. So the ultramontane enthusiasts campaigned to lift papal primacy and infallibility out of the long document and to address them alone; Pius IX concurred.[6] O’Malley notes that this effort was against the rules of the Council, causing critics to call it a “coup” (similar to what happened when the “European Alliance” circumvented the rules at Vatican II to take control of that Council). Unlike Vatican I’s first document Dei Filius on reason, faith, and the knowability of God, which had enjoyed either unanimous consent or nearly so, the primacy and infallibility document Pastor Aeternus met with fierce opposition. The so-called “minority” bishops who were opposed to the definition of papal infallibility numbered among them some of the most prestigious and learned bishops at that time. O’Malley points out that much of the debate over the definition—other than the Liberal opposition and concerns over the “opportuneness” of its timing—focused on the problem that this infallibility would be viewed as being: (1) Personal, (2) Absolute, and (3) Separate. Even among the bishops who supported infallibility, there was immense concern to clarify that the definition did not mean this charism was personal, absolute, and separate simply speaking. Bishop Karl Josef von Hefele (1809–1893)—an ecclesiastical historian—pointed out that even the Tome of Leo was examined and considered by the Council Fathers before they approved it. That is, the Council Fathers did not, as a matter of first principle, hold that if they heard from Leo, then the matter was settled. Rather, they heard what Leo had to say, weighed it, and then hailed it as Catholic dogma. Sursa: www.InSideTheVatican.com Contor Accesări: 495, Ultimul acces: 2026-10-15 19:37:23
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