Vatican I And The Papacy 3: The Attitude Of The English Bishops

Extract

The idea of holding a general council may be traced to a suggestion made to Pope Pius IX by a curial cardinal as early as 1849. The immediate background may be outlined as follows. In 1799 Pope Pius VI died in exile, a prisoner of the French. In 1813 his successor, Pius VII, a prisoner at Fontainebleau, was forced by Napoleon into signing documents which gave the emperor virtual control over the Church. With the collapse of Napoleon the pope was able to return to Rome to begin to restore his authority. When he died in 1823 the main issue at the long conclave that followed was whether a man could be found who would stand up for the independence of the Church over against the great Catholic princes. The man who was found, Leo XII, set about reorganising the Vatican with great vigour, but his reign lasted little more than five years. His successor, an old sick man who had once been among Napoleon's prisoners, died within two years. It was only in 1831, then, that, with the election of Gregory XVI after a conclave lasting seven weeks (the Spanish government intervened to veto the election of another candidate), the modern ascendancy of the papacy really began. Significantly enough, in the dark days of 1799, when he was still a young monk, lie had brought out a book entitled II trionfo della Santa Sede e della Chiesa contra gli assalti dai novatori, combattuti e respinti colle stesse loro armi, which appeared (naturally enough) in a third edition in 1832 and was translated into German in 1838. Dedicated to Pius VI, then of course a prisoner, the book identifies the Church with the juridical structure of its government, insisting that it is monarchical, and goes so far as to say that the Church is infallible because the pope, its head and foundation, is so.