John W. O’MALLEY, Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church. Harvard University Press, 2018, 307 pp., ISBN: 978-0-674-97998-7, $24.95 (cloth). Reviewed by Patrick J. HAYES, Redemptorist Archives, Philadelphia, PA 19123.

            Renowned church historian O’Malley, fighting all urges to pen such a book as the one presented here, nevertheless delivers a cracker jack rendering of the period of the First Vatican Council (1869-1870).  His focus is on the intellectual battles for papal authority, the intrigues surrounding political maneuvering “beyond the Alps,” and the spiritual currents in England, France, and Germany.  That Rome was looked upon from afar as a wounded animal, to be defended at all costs, meant that its allies established a coda for papal supremacy—found both in liturgy and in print, and one that played out during the conciliar debates on infallibility.  Its resonance could be felt long after the close of the Council. 

O’Malley has five compact and descriptive chapters to shape his narrative.  The first is a general overview of European history during “the Century of Lights.”  The second is a tour de force round up of the characters and journals that helped make the case for ultramontanism, thereby establishing the appearances of a concerted movement, principally between the 1830s and mid-1850s.  Much of this relates the positions of leading European Catholics and their sympathies, both pro and con, for the role of the papacy in the local churches of particular nations and the resistance or support demonstrated by them toward the Roman Pontiff.  For many, the “Romanization” of local church life was the measure of their success or detriment.  Active on this front were La Civiltà Cattolica and L’Universe.  In his third chapter, O’Malley focuses on ecclesial life on the eve of the Council.  Pope Pius IX had weathered a short but dramatic exile from Rome and had returned badly in need of external support.  O’Malley’s fourth chapter brings readers on to the Council floor, describes its management, and centers on the pivotal document Dei Filius, which the gathering adopted unanimously.In the beginning, though, debates were vehement and divisive.  The pope disdained his opponents.  O’Malley reports on a note found in the Vatican Archive, in the pontiff’s hand: “Some leaders among the opposing bishops are effeminate, and others are sophistical, or frivolous, or heretical.  They are all ambitious, boastful, and obstinately attached to their own opinion.” 

The subject of O’Malley’s penultimate chapter walks readers through a fraught period in which the Council fathers discussed the crucial portions of Supremi Pastoris, the document on papal primacy and infallibility.  Political jockeying and the irresolute are shown to supply the majority with the right conditions which would ultimately pass as Pastor Aeternus, enshrining the powers of the papacy as matters binding on the faithful.  About a sixth of the Council’s participants were part of a strong minority that opposed the declaration, but by the time the vote occurred, many of them had vacated Rome or come around to the majority.  The pope’s infallibility became a divinely revealed truth.

O’Malley’s text now joins the pantheon of writers who have done yeoman work on Vatican I, including Richard Costigan, who took the temperature of contemporary theologians on the irreformability question (The Consensus of the Church and Papal Infallibility, 2005); Margaret O’Gara, who has supplied fine study on the French minority bishops and infallibilism (Triumph in Defeat, 1988); and Klaus Schatz’s remarkably thorough, three-volume Vaticanum I (1992-1994).  O’Malley gives excellent summations of the thought of the key players and ideologues who pepper the pre-conciliar period, such as Bishop Félix Dupanloup, François-René Chateaubriand, and Louis Veuillot in France, Ignaz von Döllinger or Bishop Wilhelm Ketteler in Germany, or Henry Cardinal Manning in England.

In his concluding chapter, O’Malley lends sympathy to the notion that the Council’s procedures made the resulting teachings a fait accompli.  Context and the push and pull of vested interests are, apparently, the workshop and tools of the Holy Spirit.  But the fruits of the Council produced a number of widely distributed apologies for the Romanizing and full-throated support for a diminished papacy, as anyone who has read John Henry Newman’s Letter to His Grace, the Duke of Norfolk, can attest.  Loyalty is no mere feeling, but also demands action.  This, too, is a test of a Council (and one which O’Malley brings out skillfully): its reception produces a sense of continuity and connection that makes the Church a living, dynamic thing.