First Vatican Council

First Vatican Council

The First Vatican Council depicted in stained glass at Saint-Melaine Church, Domalain The First Vatican Council depicted in stained glass at Saint-Melaine Church, Domalain
Catholic enumeration	Twentieth ecumenical council
Location	Saint Peter's Basilica, Vatican
Opened	8 December 1869
Pope	Pius IX
Dogmatic constitutions	Dei Filius and Pastor aeternus
Principal doctrine	Revelation, faith and reason, Roman primacy, and papal infallibility
Suspended	20 October 1870 after the capture of Rome
Status	Never reconvened; formally closed before Vatican II

First Vatican Council is the twentieth ecumenical council, held in Saint Peter's Basilica in 1869–1870, which defined Catholic teaching on God, revelation, faith and reason, the universal jurisdiction of the Roman primacy, and the precisely limited infallibility of ex cathedra papal definitions.

Authority level: Dogma

Overview

The First Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, commonly known as the First Vatican Council or Vatican I, was the 20th ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, held three centuries after the preceding Council of Trent which was adjourned in 1563. The council was convoked by Pope Pius IX on 29 June 1868, under the rising threat of the Kingdom of Italy encroaching on the Papal States. It opened on 8 December 1869 and was adjourned on 20 September 1870 after the Italian Capture of Rome. Its best-known decision is its definition of papal infallibility.

The council's main purpose was to clarify Catholic doctrine in response to the rising influence of the modern philosophical trends of the 19th century. In the Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith (Dei Filius), the council condemned what it considered the errors of rationalism, anarchism, communism, socialism, liberalism, materialism, modernism, naturalism, pantheism, and secularism.

Its other concern was the doctrine of the primacy (supremacy) and infallibility of the Bishop of Rome (the Pope), which it defined in the First Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Christ (Pastor aeternus).

Convocation and context

Pius IX convoked the First Vatican Council by the bull Aeterni Patris of 29 June 1868. It opened on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, 8 December 1869, in the north transept of Saint Peter's Basilica. More than seven hundred bishops participated at various points, representing a Church whose episcopate had become markedly more global through missionary growth. Eastern Catholic patriarchs and bishops attended, though debates over seating, curial practice, and Latin assumptions exposed unresolved questions about the practical dignity of their Churches.

The council met amid political and intellectual upheaval. The Papal States were collapsing in the movement for Italian unification. Rationalism, materialism, pantheism, agnosticism, and historical criticism challenged the possibility or credibility of revelation. Liberal states asserted control over education, marriage, appointments, and religious life. Within Catholicism, ultramontanes emphasized papal authority, while other bishops feared that an expansive definition would distort tradition, weaken episcopal office, or intensify political hostility.

Vatican I was not convoked solely to define papal infallibility. Preparatory commissions drafted a wide program on faith, the Church, bishops, discipline, missions, and relations with civil society. Only two dogmatic constitutions were completed before war ended active work. Its surviving acts are therefore both weighty and incomplete: they teach what they define, but the council's unpromulgated schemas do not become magisterial teaching merely because experts prepared or debated them.

Membership and procedure

Papal legates and officers directed the procedure, commissions revised schemas, and the fathers spoke and voted in general congregations before public sessions. The acoustics of Saint Peter's, the size of the assembly, winter weather, and the volume of proposed amendments complicated debate. Critics charged that the regulations favored the majority and Roman theologians; defenders noted the extensive speeches, written observations, revised drafts, and freedom of bishops to oppose formulations. The final texts changed in response to objections.

The council's ecumenical authority does not depend on modern parliamentary equality or the absence of papal initiative. The pope alone convokes and confirms an ecumenical council, while bishops exercise real deliberative judgment as members of the college. Historical assessment can criticize procedures without treating every procedural dissatisfaction as evidence that assent was coerced or the council invalid.

The Roman Question

French troops protected Rome when the council opened. The Franco-Prussian War forced their withdrawal in August 1870, and Italian forces entered Rome on 20 September after a brief bombardment. The political sovereignty of the Papal States effectively ended. Many bishops had already departed, and the changed conditions made continued assembly impossible. Pius IX suspended the council on 20 October without fixing a date for resumption.

Suspension did not invalidate the constitutions already solemnly approved. Nor did it turn draft teaching on the episcopate into an implicit definition. The unfinished council remained legally open but inactive until John XXIII formally regarded it as closed before Vatican II. The loss of temporal territory, paradoxically, clarified the spiritual nature of papal primacy even as the Holy See continued to assert the freedom necessary for its mission.

Dei Filius on Catholic faith

The dogmatic constitution Dei Filius, promulgated on 24 April 1870, treats God the creator, revelation, faith, and the relation of faith and reason. It confesses one true and living God, absolutely simple, immutable, spiritual, omnipotent, and distinct from the world. God created spiritual and bodily creatures freely, not to increase divine happiness but to manifest perfection through created goods. Providence sustains and governs all things without eliminating creaturely causality or human freedom.

This teaching rejects pantheism, materialism, and accounts in which the world is a necessary development of divine substance. Creation ex nihilo means that everything other than God depends radically on him and is genuinely other than him. The natural order possesses real integrity precisely because it is created. Scientific explanation of processes within creation does not compete with God as first cause, and belief in creation does not supply a substitute mechanism for empirical inquiry.

Natural knowledge of God

Vatican I defined that God, the origin and end of all things, can be known with certainty from created things by the natural light of human reason. This does not say that every person easily constructs a philosophical demonstration, that grace is unnecessary for salvation, or that the divine mysteries can be comprehended. It says created reality truly manifests its Creator and that the human intellect is not by nature imprisoned within phenomena or incapable of metaphysical truth.

Revelation remains morally necessary so that truths about God accessible to reason can be known by all with facility, firm certainty, and freedom from error in the present condition of humanity. Revelation is absolutely necessary for supernatural truths that exceed created reason and for the supernatural vocation to which God calls humanity. Nature and grace are distinguished without being separated: reason can know real truth, and revelation heals, elevates, and directs the person to divine communion.

Revelation and the obedience of faith

Faith is a supernatural virtue by which, moved and assisted by grace, a person believes what God has revealed because of the authority of God who can neither deceive nor be deceived. The formal motive is divine truthfulness, not the independent probability assigned to each mystery. Yet faith is not irrational. Miracles, prophecy, the Church's holiness and fruitfulness, catholic unity, and enduring stability function as signs of revelation's credibility and show that assent is consonant with reason.

No one comes to saving faith without grace, and no one is forced. Grace enables a genuinely human assent of intellect and will. The council rejects both rationalism, which accepts only what autonomous reason can derive, and fideism, which denies reason's capacity and detaches faith from credible revelation. Doubt, inquiry, and growth can occur within faith, but the believer does not treat God's revealed word as a hypothesis suspended before private judgment.

Faith and reason cannot contradict

Because the same God reveals mysteries and gives the light of reason, truth cannot contradict truth. An apparent conflict arises from misunderstanding the dogma, presenting an opinion as dogma, faulty reasoning, inadequate evidence, or overreaching scientific and theological claims. The Church protects the deposit and can judge philosophical propositions that directly contradict revelation, while each science follows its proper principles and methods.

The council encouraged the fruitful development of knowledge when pursued within its proper order. Faith frees reason from errors and enriches it with truths it could not discover alone; reason demonstrates preambles, examines motives of credibility, clarifies concepts, and helps theology draw conclusions. Neither discipline is served by a false truce in which contradictory claims are declared true in separate domains.

Pastor aeternus on the Roman primacy

Pastor aeternus, promulgated on 18 July 1870, teaches that Christ conferred on Peter a primacy of jurisdiction over the whole Church and that this office continues in the bishops of Rome. The pope possesses ordinary, immediate, truly episcopal jurisdiction over pastors and faithful in matters of faith, morals, discipline, and government. Ordinary means the power belongs to the office itself; immediate means it can be exercised without requiring another human authority as intermediary.

Universal jurisdiction does not make the pope the only bishop or reduce diocesan bishops to branch managers. Pastor aeternus explicitly states that papal authority upholds and defends the ordinary and immediate episcopal jurisdiction by which bishops feed and govern their assigned flocks. The pope's power is supreme but ecclesial: received from Christ, bounded by divine revelation and the Church's constitution, and ordered to unity and salvation rather than personal domination.

Primacy of jurisdiction

The council rejected theories limiting Roman primacy to inspection, direction, or an honor without governing power. It also rejected the claim that papal decrees require civil authorization before they can bind spiritually. The faithful and pastors can have recourse to the Apostolic See, and no ecclesiastical authority stands above its supreme judgment. These propositions answered Gallican, Febronian, and state-church systems that divided universal government among national authorities.

The definition concerns ecclesiastical communion and jurisdiction, not competence to decide every scientific, economic, military, or technical question. Popes make prudential judgments that can be mistaken, administer through human offices that can fail, and are morally accountable to divine law. Supreme jurisdiction is not universal expertise, inspiration, impeccability, or permission to contradict prior revelation.

The precise conditions of papal infallibility

The pope enjoys infallibility when he speaks ex cathedra: exercising his office as pastor and teacher of all Christians, by his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church. In such an act the divine assistance promised to Peter preserves the definition from error. The four elements—papal office, supreme authority, a definitive act, and doctrine of faith or morals imposed on the universal Church—exclude ordinary remarks, interviews, disciplinary choices, private theology, and most papal documents.

Infallibility does not create new revelation. The pope is charged to guard and faithfully expound the apostolic deposit. Consultation, study, episcopal testimony, and the sensus fidei ordinarily prepare a definition, though they are not external authorities that supply validity by voting. The phrase irreformable of themselves and not from the consent of the Church denies that a later ratification makes the definition true. It does not separate the pope from the Church whose faith he articulates and confirms.

The charism is negative protection from doctrinal error in the defined proposition, not a guarantee that the definition uses the best arguments, settles every related question, or produces immediate pastoral success. The pope remains capable of sin, negligence, poor governance, ambiguous nondefinitive expression, and factual mistake. Catholics owe different forms of assent to papal acts according to their authority; calling every papal statement infallible diminishes rather than exalts the defined gift.

The vote and minority bishops

A substantial minority considered a definition inopportune or sought narrower wording, often because they feared political consequences or an interpretation hostile to episcopal authority. Before the final public session, many received permission to leave rather than vote non placet in the pope's presence. The final vote was 533 in favor and two against; the two dissenting bishops immediately submitted. Bishops who had departed subsequently accepted the constitution.

The departure does not prove that no debate occurred or that the final vote was a spontaneous unanimity. It records a painful but ecclesial process in which opposition influenced revisions and then gave way to reception of the confirmed definition. Historical honesty should preserve both the intensity of disagreement and the eventual communion of the bishops, rather than manufacturing either a frictionless consensus or an invalid act imposed on an unwilling Church.

Reception, schism, and clarification

Some clergy and scholars in German-speaking lands rejected Pastor aeternus and formed Old Catholic bodies. Their separation involved not only a historical opinion about whether definition was prudent but refusal of a dogmatic act of an ecumenical council confirmed by the pope. Other governments exploited fears that Catholics owed a foreign sovereign civil obedience. The German bishops answered that papal jurisdiction concerns the Church's divine mission and does not absorb the civil power or abolish bishops; Pius IX praised their explanation.

The council's teaching was gradually integrated into canonical practice, theology, and popular devotion. Exaggerated ultramontane habits sometimes treated papal preferences as the measure of every Catholic question, while opponents reduced the primacy to centralized politics. Authentic reception rejects both. Peter's successor serves the unity of the bishops and faithful by a real universal authority whose exercise should strengthen, not supplant, the life of particular Churches.

Vatican II completes the ecclesiological account

Vatican II expressly reaffirmed Vatican I and taught that the college of bishops, with the pope as its head and never without him, is also subject of supreme and full power over the universal Church. Episcopal consecration confers the fullness of Orders and a share in concern for all Churches; diocesan bishops possess ordinary, proper, and immediate authority in their dioceses. These teachings complete the treatment Vatican I could not finish.

Completion is not correction of an error. Vatican I already protected episcopal jurisdiction, while Vatican II placed primacy in a fuller sacramental theology of the episcopate and communion of particular Churches. The explanatory note attached to Lumen gentium prevents collegiality from being construed as a second supreme authority independent of the pope. The same constitution prevents primacy from being construed as solitary rule without a college.

Ecumenical discussion of primacy

Papal primacy remains a central question in Catholic dialogue with Orthodox and Protestant Christians. The Catholic Church cannot renounce Vatican I's dogma, but she can distinguish the substance of primacy from contingent modes of centralization and seek an exercise recognizable as service to unity. John Paul II invited other Christian leaders to help identify forms of exercising the ministry without surrendering its essential mission.

Dialogue requires precision about the first millennium, appeals to Rome, synodal structures, and the difference between doctrine and administrative practice. It cannot succeed by translating universal jurisdiction into mere honor, nor by demanding that every historical papal intervention become the permanent model. Vatican I supplies dogmatic boundaries within which legitimate development and reform of exercise can occur.

The council and the modern intellectual crisis

Vatican I is sometimes reduced to a defensive reaction against modernity, but Dei Filius makes a positive claim about the intelligibility of creation and the dignity of reason. The Church refused the choice between a rationalism that closes the world to revelation and a fideism that despairs of the intellect. That refusal supported later Catholic engagement with historical study, natural science, philosophy, and democratic society even when particular churchmen responded defensively or imprudently to new questions.

The council's anathemas identify boundaries rather than abolish inquiry. They reject propositions such as the identity of God and the world, the necessity of creation, the impossibility of supernatural revelation, and the reduction of faith to conclusions of natural reason. Within those boundaries theologians can dispute proofs, epistemology, the precise relation of grace and nature, and the best account of scientific explanation. Dogma gives inquiry a true horizon; it does not furnish an answer to every subordinate problem.

The Syllabus and the council

Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors of 1864 shaped the atmosphere in which the council met, especially controversies over indifferentism, state control, liberalism, and the temporal power. The Syllabus is not a decree of Vatican I, and its terse condemned propositions must be interpreted through the documents from which they were extracted. It cannot simply be pasted onto Pastor aeternus or Dei Filius as though all three had identical genre and authority.

Several proposed conciliar schemas would have addressed Church–state relations and modern errors more broadly, but they were never promulgated. Historical drafts help scholars understand concerns and debates; they have no magisterial force. Later Catholic social teaching developed the rights of conscience, religious liberty, constitutional order, and the legitimate autonomy of temporal affairs while maintaining that truth imposes moral duties on persons and societies.

Science and theological method

The definition that God can be known from creation is metaphysical, not a rival scientific hypothesis. Evolutionary biology, cosmology, and neuroscience examine created causes and processes. They contradict the faith only when philosophical materialism is smuggled into scientific description or when theological interpretation denies evidence without doctrinal warrant. Vatican I's Creator is not a temporary explanation inserted where science lacks data, but the transcendent cause of the existence and order of every finite reality.

Theology proceeds from revelation received in faith and uses reason to understand, relate, and defend what God has made known. Because mysteries exceed reason, comprehension is analogical and never exhaustive. Because revelation is true, theology cannot embrace contradiction as depth. Vatican I's balance prepared the way for renewed Thomism, biblical scholarship under later papal guidance, and the mature synthesis of faith and reason articulated by John Paul II.

Conscience and ecclesial assent

The definition of primacy generated appeals to conscience from both supporters and opponents. Catholic conscience is the proximate judgment of practical reason and must be followed, but it must also be formed by truth. It is not a faculty by which private conviction cancels a dogmatic definition. A person who struggles to understand remains obliged to seek, pray, study, and avoid dishonest profession; the Church accompanies difficulty without presenting definitive teaching as one option among others.

Ecclesial assent is reasonable because Christ entrusted a teaching office to the Church and promised divine assistance. It is also differentiated. Defined dogma requires the assent of faith; definitive doctrine requires firm and definitive assent; authentic nondefinitive teaching requires religious submission according to its weight; prudential judgments allow greater evaluation. Vatican I's own documents exemplify these distinctions, combining dogmatic definitions, authoritative exposition, historical argument, and procedural acts.

Authority and unfinished business

Dei Filius and Pastor aeternus are dogmatic constitutions containing solemn definitions of the extraordinary Magisterium. Their canons condemn contrary propositions, and their chapters authoritatively explain the definitions. Historical assertions, theological arguments, and unpromulgated drafts do not all share the same status. The council's authority must be identified from the final approved texts rather than slogans such as the pope is infallible.

Because the council was suspended, it produced no complete constitution on the Church, episcopal office, missions, discipline, or contemporary society. Silence is not a negative definition. Later teaching may address an omitted subject so long as it preserves what Vatican I actually defined. Vatican II did precisely this, receiving both constitutions and extending ecclesiology around them.

Common misunderstandings

The council did not teach that popes never err, receive new revelation, govern without law, or replace the conscience of the faithful. It did not deny salvation to everyone who lacks philosophical proofs of God, or declare scientific theories suspect merely for being new. It did not make political loyalty to the Papal States an article of faith. Each caricature confuses a defined object with a broader nineteenth-century controversy.

Conversely, the definition cannot be reduced to a rare ceremonial opinion with no effect on ordinary Catholic life. The pope possesses real universal jurisdiction even outside ex cathedra definitions, and his authentic nondefinitive Magisterium can demand religious submission of intellect and will according to its authority. Infallibility is one charism within a larger office of teaching and government.

Permanent legacy

Vatican I secured the compatibility of faith and reason against both rationalism and fideism, articulated the credibility and supernatural character of faith, and defined the Roman primacy at the moment the pope lost temporal sovereignty. Its unfinished character invited later synthesis rather than repeal. Read with Trent, Vatican II, and the Catechism, it remains a foundation for Catholic theology, apologetics, ecclesiology, and ecumenical dialogue.

The council also teaches a methodological lesson. Strong papal authority and genuine episcopal deliberation are not enemies, doctrinal definition can emerge through contested debate, and political catastrophe need not defeat the Church's spiritual mission. The papacy left the age of the Papal States with its universal ecclesial office more exactly defined and its temporal form open to providential reconstruction.

Background

As early as late 1864, Pope Pius IX had commissioned the cardinals resident in Rome to tender him their opinions as to the advisability of a council. The majority supported the scheme, with dissenting voices being rare. After March 1865, the convocation of the council was no longer in doubt. Special bulls were reportedly issued with invitations to Eastern Orthodox and Protestant clerics as well as to other non-Catholics, but apparently none accepted the invitations.

The council was summoned by the pope by a bull on 29 June 1868. The first session was held in St. Peter's Basilica on 8 December 1869. Preliminary sessions dealt with general administrative matters and committee assignments. Bishop Bernard John McQuaid complained of rainy weather, inadequate heating facilities, and boredom. Bishop James Roosevelt Bayley of Newark, New Jersey, noted the high prices in Rome. When Lord Houghton asked Cardinal Manning what had been going on, he answered: "Well, we meet, and we look at one another, and then we talk a little, but when we want to know what we have been doing, we read The Times."

Unlike the five earlier general councils held in Rome, which met in the Lateran Basilica and are known as Lateran councils, this council met in Saint Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, hence its name.

Papal infallibility

The object of the council was a mystery for a while. The first revelation was given in February 1869 by an article in La Civiltà Cattolica, a Jesuit periodical. It claimed, as the view of many Catholics in France, that the council would be of very brief duration, since the majority of its members were in agreement, and mentioned inter alia the proclamation of papal infallibility. Factions around the proposal arose across Europe, and some Italians even proposed setting up a rival council in Naples. However, before the council met all became quiet in view of the studied vagueness of the invitation.

Pope Pius defined as dogma the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in 1854. However, the proposal to define papal infallibility itself as dogma met with resistance, not because of doubts about the substance of the proposed definition, but because some considered it inopportune to take that step at that time. Richard McBrien divides the bishops attending Vatican I into three groups. The first group, which McBrien calls the "active infallibilists", was led by Henry Edward Manning and Ignatius von Senestrey. According to McBrien, the majority of the bishops were not so much interested in a formal definition of papal infallibility as they were in strengthening papal authority and, because of this, were willing to accept the agenda of the infallibilists. A minority, some 10% of the bishops, McBrien says, opposed the proposed definition of papal infallibility on both ecclesiastical and pragmatic grounds, because, in their opinion, it departed from the ecclesiastical structure of the early Christian church. From a pragmatic perspective, they feared that defining papal infallibility would alienate some Catholics, create new difficulties for union with non-Catholics, and provoke interference by governments in ecclesiastical affairs. Those who held this view included most of the German and Austro-Hungarian bishops, nearly half of the Americans, one third of the French, most of the Chaldaeans and Melkites, and a few Armenians. Only a few bishops appear to have had doubts about the dogma itself.

Dei Filius

On 24 April 1870, the dogmatic constitution on the Catholic faith Dei Filius was adopted unanimously. The draft presented to the council on 8 March drew no serious criticism, but a group of 35 English-speaking bishops, who feared that the opening phrase of the first chapter, "Sancta romana catholica Ecclesia" ('Holy Roman Catholic Church'), might be construed as favouring the Anglican branch theory, later succeeded in having an additional adjective inserted, so that the final text read: "Sancta catholica apostolica romana Ecclesia" ('Holy Catholic Apostolic Roman Church'). The constitution thus set forth the teaching of the "Holy Catholic Apostolic Roman Church" on God, revelation and faith.

Pastor aeternus

There was stronger opposition to the draft constitution on the nature of the church, which at first did not include the question of papal infallibility, but the majority party in the council, whose position on this matter was much stronger, brought it forward. It was decided to postpone discussion of everything in the draft except infallibility. The decree did not go forward without controversy; Cardinal Filippo Maria Guidi, Archbishop of Bologna, proposed adding that the pope is assisted by "the counsel of the bishops manifesting the tradition of the churches". Pius IX rejected Guidi's view of the bishops as witnesses to the tradition, maintaining: "I am the tradition."

On 13 July 1870, a preliminary vote on the section on infallibility was held in a general congregation: 451 voted simply in favour (placet), 88 against (non placet), and 62 in favour but on condition of some amendment (placet iuxta modum). This made evident what the outcome would be, and some 60 members of the opposition left Rome so as not to be associated with approval of the document. The final vote, with a choice only between placet and non placet, was taken on 18 July 1870, with 533 votes in favour and only 2 against defining as a dogma the infallibility of the pope when speaking ex cathedra. The two votes in opposition were cast by Bishops Aloisio Riccio and Edward Fitzgerald.

The dogmatic constitution states, in chapter 4:9, that the pope has "full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church" (chapter 3:9); and that, when he:

speaks ex cathedra, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals.

None of the bishops who had argued that proclaiming the definition was inopportune refused to accept it. Some Catholics, mainly of German language and largely inspired by the historian Ignaz von Döllinger, formed the separate Old Catholic Church in protest; von Döllinger did not formally join the new group himself.

Suspension and aftermath

Discussion of the rest of the document on the nature of the church was to continue when the bishops returned after a summer break. In the meanwhile, France declared war on Prussia, but soon was losing territory. With the swift advance of Prussian and allied South German forces in August, leading to the capture of Emperor Napoleon III at Sedan in early September, French troops protecting papal rule in Rome withdrew from the city. Italy occupied Rome on 20 September 1870, but forces stayed away from the Leonine City, and Pope Pius IX considered himself a prisoner in the Vatican.

On 20 October 1870, one month after the newly founded Kingdom of Italy had occupied Rome, Pope Pius IX issued the bull Postquam Dei munere, adjourning the council indefinitely. While some proposed to continue the council in the Belgian city of Mechlin, it was never reconvened. Various schemata (documents in the process of being drafted and debated) remained unfinished, such as two schemata on nature of the Church: Supremi pastoris, prepared by the Council's Theological-Dogmatic Preparatory Commission, and Tametsi Deus, drafted by the German theologian Joseph Kleutgen SJ.

In reaction to the political implications of the doctrine of infallibility on the sovereignty of secular states, some of the European kingdoms and republics took rapid action against the Catholic Church. The Austrian Empire annulled the Concordat of 1855. In the Kingdom of Prussia, the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf broke out immediately afterwards, and in the French Third Republic the synod so accentuated the power of ultramontanism (an emphasis on the powers of the pope), that Republican France took steps to curb it by eventually getting to revoking the Concordat of 1801 in 1905, and therefore completely separating the Church from the state.

Controversies and opposition

The dogma of papal infallibility raised considerable opposition in some liberal theological circles in the Netherlands, Austria, Germany and Switzerland; the most notable theologian opposing the formulation of the dogma was Ignaz von Döllinger, who was excommunicated in 1871 by Archbishop Gregor von Scherr of Munich and Freising, for refusing to accept the council's decision.

Old Catholic schism

Following the council's decision, a minority of clergy and laity opposed to the newly proclaimed dogma united with the Jansenists, which had maintained a somewhat precarious existence in separation from Rome since the 18th century but had preserved an episcopal succession recognized by Rome as valid though illicit. The first consecration of the new order was that of Joseph H. Reinkens, who was made bishop in Germany by a sympathetic Jansenist bishop Johannes Heykamp of Utrecht. Such new group referred to itself as the Old Catholic Church (or the Christian Catholic Church in Switzerland). Old Catholics in Europe united into the Union of Utrecht in 1889, which entered into full communion with the Anglican Communion in 1931 through the Bonn Agreement.

The Union of Utrecht still exists to this day and includes the Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands, the Catholic Diocese of the Old Catholics in Germany, the Old Catholic Church of Austria, the Old Catholic Church of the Czech Republic, the Polish-Catholic Church of the Republic of Poland and the Christian Catholic Church of Switzerland. The Union of Scranton, formed by more theologically conservative Old Catholics, was formed in 2008 and currently includes the Polish National Catholic Church and the Nordic Catholic Church.

Masonic Anti-Council

Radical democrat Giuseppe Ricciardi, with the assistance of Freemasons, Spiritists, and feminists, organized an Anticoncilio of freethinkers to take place in Naples on the same days as Vatican I. This meeting was dissolved by Italian police after just two days.

See also

• Second Vatican Council

External links

• Text of the council's ruling

Further reading

• De Cesare, Raffaele (1909). The Last Days of Papal Rome. Translated by Zimmern, Helen. London: Archibald Constable & Co.
• Hales, E. E. Y. (1958). The Catholic Church in the Modern World: A Survey from the French Revolution to the Present. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
• Hales, E. E. Y. Pio Nono (1954) biography of Pope Pius IX; online
• Hasler, August Bernhard (1981). How the Pope Became Infallible: Pius IX and the Politics of Persuasion. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0385158510.
• Hoppen, K. Theodore. "First Vatican Council, 1869–70" History Today (Oct 1969), Vol. 19 Issue 10, pp. 713–720 online
• Kadić, Ante. "Bishop Strossmayer and the First Vatican Council." Slavonic and East European Review 49.116 (1971): 382–409. online; he played a major role.
• Noether, Emiliana P. "Vatican Council I: Its Political and Religious Setting." Journal of Modern History 40.2 (1968): 218–233. online.
• Portier, William L. "The First Vatican Council, John Henry Newman, and the Making of a Post-Christendom Church." Newman Studies Journal 17.1 (2020): 123–144. excerpt
• Prusak, Bernard P. (2004). The Church Unfinished: Ecclesiology through the Centuries. New York: Paulist Press. ISBN 978-0-8091-4286-6.
• Raymond, John. "The First Vatican Council 1869–1870." History Today (Nov 1962) 12#11 pp 759–767. online.
• Verhoeven, Timothy. "Transatlantic Connections: American Anti-Catholicism and the First Vatican Council (1869–70)." Catholic Historical Review 100.4 (2014): 695–720. Anti-Catholics were outraged. excerpt
• Wallace, L. P. The Papacy and European Diplomacy, 1869–1878 (U North Carolina Press, 1948)

Bibliography

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