How has Pastor Aeternus stood the test of time in the face of Vatican II, the great social leveling brought about by democracy and the mass media, and the severe erosion of confidence in hierarchical institutions, including the Catholic Church?

Many pressing issues facing the church today require a deeper appreciation of Vatican I, marking its one hundred and fiftieth year. We can now return it to its context and accept its “incompleteness” rather than insist upon its “wrongness.” The distance provided by time shows that its teachings are not as rigid or extreme as they are often perceived to be, but rather stand open to significantly broader interpretations. Pastor Aeternus has faced Vatican II, the social leveling brought about by democracy and the mass media, and an erosion of confidence in hierarchical institutions. Yet the council cannot be left behind. This essay's goal is to contextualize Vatican I's voice so that we can hear what it intended to say in its own day and see how it might contribute to some of our own most urgent conversations today.

While the First Vatican Council (1869–70) decreed that for Catholics it is a dogma of faith that we can have certain knowledge of God by the natural light of reason it was only in the Anti-Modernist Oath (1910) that this knowledge was defined as rationally demonstrable by cosmological arguments.