Vatican I And The Papacy (I): A Proud Appellation

Extract

“Perhaps the definition will limit the Pope’s power”: thus Newman wrote, less than a fortnight after the Vatican Council issued its decrees on papal jurisdiction and infallibility, to one of the many anxious Catholics who turned to him for explanation and comfort (Letters, XXV, 170). A few weeks later, answering the wife of the founder-editor of the Liverpool Daily Post, he pursued the same idea a little further: “As to this particular doctrine (Papal infallibility) I am not at all sure it will increase the Pope’s power— it may restrict it. Hitherto he has done what he would, because its limits were not defined—now he must act by rule” (p. 204). But he goes on to say that he cannot prophesy how it will be. With a century behind us since 1870, during which many Catholics have accepted, and allowed other people to believe, that the pope is infallible and that he has the right to do what he likes with the Church, it is surely evident that, if we return to the decrees and read them in peace, Newman’s hunch is verified that they mark an end, rather than an aggrandizement, of papal power. The attempt to secure fat more (because many Catholics at the time plainly were seeking to commit the Church to a form of permanent papal dictatorship) finished by securing far less than the practice of papal authority had often assumed in the past. Now that we can read the decrees without being intimidated by the ultramontanist interpretation so frequently put on them, almost from the outset, it is possible to appreciate, as Newman did at the time, how drastically the texts limit the pope’s prerogatives. Indeed, as he suggests, the miasma of triumphalist propaganda with which the decrees have been so successfully obscured must itself derive its animus from the frustration, on the part of Manning and his publicists (such as Ward and Herbert Vaughan), at their at least half recognizing that so little had been secured.