First Vatican Council

History

Causes

The council answered two pressures at once. The first came from outside the church. Liberal states were stripping the church of schools, property and legal privileges, and the Papal States were shrinking under the new Kingdom of Italy. Pius IX had already condemned the century’s ideas wholesale in the Syllabus of Errors (1864, text), whose last proposition rejected the claim that the pope “can, and ought to, reconcile himself” with progress, liberalism and modern civilization. A council would put the bishops of the world behind that stand.

The second pressure was inside the church: an old argument over where final authority lay. Gallicanism in France held that a council stands above the pope and, in the Four Gallican Articles of 1682, that papal judgments are not irreformable without the consent of the church. Febronianism and Josephinism in the German lands gave bishops and princes a similar check on Rome. Against these grew ultramontanism, the party “beyond the mountains” that looked to the pope as the church’s living center. Joseph de Maistre’s Du Pape (1819) argued for papal sovereignty and infallibility, and by mid-century the ultramontane press, led by Louis Veuillot’s L’Univers, had made it popular. In 1854 Pius IX defined the Immaculate Conception on his own authority in Ineffabilis Deus (text), after consulting the bishops by letter but without a council. Many asked whether that act should now be given a formal basis.

Pius convoked the council with the bull Aeterni Patris in June 1868. Infallibility was not on the published agenda. It was put there by petition from the majority once the bishops had gathered.

Proceedings

The council opened in St Peter’s on 8 December 1869 with about 700 bishops, the largest gathering of its kind to that date. It held four public sessions (texts and session dates). The real work happened in general congregations, where draft texts (schemata) were debated and sent back for revision.

The first finished text was the dogmatic constitution on the Catholic faith, Dei Filius, passed unanimously on 24 April 1870. Debate then turned to the church. The planned schema on the church as a whole was set aside, and its chapter on the pope was moved forward and expanded into a separate constitution, Pastor Aeternus. That choice, which the minority resisted, is why Vatican I spoke about the pope at length and about bishops hardly at all.

The bishops split into a large majority, led by Henry Edward Manning, archbishop of Westminster, and Ignaz von Senestrey of Regensburg, and a minority of perhaps a fifth. The minority included Félix Dupanloup of Orléans, Josip Juraj Strossmayer of Đakovo, Karl Joseph von Hefele of Rottenburg, Wilhelm von Ketteler of Mainz, Peter Richard Kenrick of St Louis and Cardinals Rauscher of Vienna and Schwarzenberg of Prague. Most of them did not deny that the pope taught with special authority. They argued that a definition was inopportune: it would hurt reunion with Protestants and the Orthodox, provoke governments, and cut the pope off from the bishops. Outside the hall, Ignaz von Döllinger in Munich and Lord Acton in Rome fed the opposition, Döllinger through the anonymous Janus (1869) and the Letters from Rome on the Council published under the name “Quirinus” (1870).

On 11 July 1870 Bishop Vincent Gasser of Brixen gave the official explanation of the infallibility chapter for the deputation on faith. He narrowed its scope: the gift is not revelation or inspiration, applies only to solemn definitions on faith and morals, and does not make the pope independent of the church’s faith. At a preliminary vote on 13 July, 451 voted yes, 88 no and 62 yes with amendments. About sixty of the minority then left Rome rather than vote against the pope in his presence. On 18 July Pastor Aeternus passed 533 to 2 (summary, secondary). The two no votes, from Bishops Aloisio Riccio and Edward Fitzgerald, were followed at once by their submission.

The next day France declared war on Prussia. The French garrison that protected Rome was withdrawn, Italian troops entered the city on 20 September, and on 20 October Pius suspended the council indefinitely. It was never reconvened or formally closed.

Influence

Every bishop of the minority eventually accepted the decrees. Some resistance outside the episcopate did not. Döllinger refused and was excommunicated in 1871. Catholics who followed him met in Munich that year and, with a bishop consecrated in 1873 from the Dutch church of Utrecht (separated from Rome since 1723), formed the Old Catholic churches. Their Declaration of Utrecht (1889) rejected the Vatican decrees, and in 1931 they entered full communion with the Church of England (Union of Utrecht; overview, secondary).

Politically the decrees fed Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church in Germany in the 1870s. In Britain William Gladstone argued in The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance (1874) that Catholics could no longer be loyal citizens, which drew John Henry Newman’s Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875, text).

In the longer run the council fixed the shape of modern Catholicism: centralized on Rome, with the pope as the visible test of orthodoxy and the Magisterium as the church’s living teaching office. Its unfinished business, the place of bishops, was taken up by the Second Vatican Council.

Key ideas and contributors

Papal primacy of jurisdiction. Pastor Aeternus taught that Christ gave Peter a primacy of jurisdiction over the whole church, and that it continues in his successors the bishops of Rome (Matthew 16:18–19, John 21:15–17). Chapter 3 calls this power “both episcopal and immediate,” and its canon condemns anyone who denies that the pope has “the full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole church” or that this power is “ordinary and immediate” over every church and every believer (text). This is the strongest form of Papal Primacy the church has defined.

Papal infallibility. Chapter 4 defines “as a divinely revealed dogma” that when the pope speaks ex cathedra, as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, defining a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the whole church, he possesses “that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his church to enjoy.” It adds that such definitions are irreformable “of themselves, and not by the consent of the church,” a phrase aimed at the Gallican articles (text; cf. Luke 22:32). Gasser’s explanation stressed how narrow this is. Since 1870 the only papal definition generally agreed to meet the test is Pius XII’s dogma of the Assumption of Mary, Munificentissimus Deus (1950, Vatican).

Faith and reason. Dei Filius held that God “can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason” (Romans 1:20), against fideists who said God could be known only by faith. It also held that revelation is necessary to know the mysteries of faith, against rationalists. Chapter 4 states that “there can never be any real disagreement between faith and reason,” since the same God gives both. This was a restatement of the synthesis associated with Thomas Aquinas, whose study Leo XIII made central to Catholic seminaries nine years later.

Scripture and revelation. Dei Filius restated the Council of Trent on the canon and on Scripture and tradition, and said the church holds the biblical books sacred because, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author. That sentence became a reference point in later Catholic debates about Scripture and Inerrancy.

Key controversies

Was the definition opportune? This was the minority’s main case inside the council. Dupanloup, Strossmayer and others argued that defining infallibility would raise new walls against Protestants and the Orthodox and give hostile governments a weapon. Events partly proved them right in Germany and Britain. The majority answered that a doctrine already widely held needed a clear statement precisely because it was under attack.

History and the Honorius case. Hefele, the leading historian of the councils, pressed the case of Pope Honorius I, condemned as a heretic by the Third Council of Constantinople in 681 for his letters on the will of Christ. If a pope could be condemned by an ecumenical council, the minority asked, how could papal teaching be irreformable? The majority replied that Honorius had not defined anything ex cathedra. Döllinger went further, arguing that the doctrine rested on medieval forgeries such as the False Decretals. Later the historian Brian Tierney, in Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150–1350 (1972), argued that the idea first appeared with the Franciscan Peter Olivi in the late thirteenth century. Catholic historians still debate how far back the doctrine can be traced.

Pope and bishops. Did Pastor Aeternus reduce bishops to papal deputies? Bismarck’s government said so in 1872. The German bishops answered in a collective declaration (1875) that bishops are not papal officials and that the pope’s jurisdiction does not absorb theirs, and Pius IX endorsed their reply. The deeper fix came in Lumen Gentium (1964, Vatican), which taught the collegiality of bishops and, in section 25, located infallibility in the body of bishops united with the pope as well as in the pope alone. How far Vatican II balanced or merely supplemented Vatican I is a live question in debates over Conciliarity and Episcopal Polity.

Conscience and civil loyalty. Gladstone claimed that Catholics had handed their moral and civil judgment to Rome. Newman answered that infallibility is rare and limited, that it covers definitions and not commands, and that conscience keeps its rights. He closed his argument: “I shall drink—to the Pope, if you please,—still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards” (§5).

Freedom of the council. Critics then and since have asked whether the council was free. The minority complained about the rules of procedure, the reordering of the agenda and the pressure of the pope’s own views. A famous saying attributed to Pius IX, “La tradizione sono io” (“I am tradition”), said to Cardinal Guidi on the evening of 18 June 1870 after he spoke for limiting infallibility, is reported in later accounts (FSSPX News (secondary); Hubert Wolf, Der Unfehlbare (secondary)). John W. O’Malley’s Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church (Harvard University Press, 2018) gives a recent, balanced account of these charges.

Objections from other churches. The Eastern Orthodox rejected the decrees as the culmination of the papal claims behind the Great Schism, insisting that the church’s infallibility belongs to the whole body and is expressed through councils received by the faithful. Patriarch Anthimos VII of Constantinople restated this in his encyclical of 1895 answering Leo XIII. Protestants objected that the definition placed a living office above Scripture, the reverse of Sola Scriptura. Anglican and Old Catholic theologians met with Orthodox at the Bonn reunion conferences of 1874–75, convened by Döllinger, partly in response to the council.

Modern challenges. Hans Küng’s Infallible? An Inquiry (1970; English 1971) argued that the church is indefectible in the truth but that no proposition can be guaranteed infallible. Rome withdrew his licence to teach as a Catholic theologian in 1979. Debate has also turned to what else counts as infallible teaching: after Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994), the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said in 1995 that its teaching on the male priesthood is infallible through the ordinary and universal magisterium, not through a papal definition. Critics answered that this stretched infallibility past the limits Gasser had drawn.

What remains unresolved

Vatican I settled that the pope can define doctrine infallibly. It left open how often he does, how the church recognizes that he has, and how papal authority fits with the bishops’ own. Interrupted by war, the council said almost nothing about bishops, laity or the wider church, and Catholic theology has spent the time since filling that gap. For other Christians, the decrees remain one of the largest obstacles to reunion with Rome, and the question of what a papal primacy acceptable to them might look like is still open.