The First Vatican Council

The council that opened in Rome in December 1869 met in a papacy under pressure. The Papal States were being absorbed into a unified Italy, liberal governments across Europe were curtailing church privileges, and Pius IX had responded with a series of increasingly uncompromising documents. Against that background the definition of papal infallibility can be read as a claim to spiritual authority made precisely as temporal authority was disappearing.

The constitution Pastor Aeternus defines two things, and the second is often forgotten. It defines papal primacy of jurisdiction, an ordinary and immediate authority over every church and every believer, and it defines that the pope is preserved from error when he speaks ex cathedra to define doctrine on faith or morals for the whole church. The conditions are narrow, and the definition explicitly does not make every papal utterance infallible, a limitation the popular understanding of the doctrine routinely ignores.

The opposition was substantial and largely tactical rather than doctrinal. A minority held the definition inopportune, likely to harm relations with governments and with other Christians, and many of them left Rome before the final vote rather than record a public no against the pope. The vote carried overwhelmingly. Most of the minority submitted afterwards; a small number did not, and formed the Old Catholic churches, which retain episcopal orders and reject the definition.

The council was suspended, not concluded. In July 1870 the Franco-Prussian war began and the French garrison protecting Rome withdrew. In September Italian troops entered the city and the Papal States ended. The bishops dispersed, the council was suspended in October, and its unfinished agenda, which included a full treatment of the church of which the section on the papacy was only one part, was never taken up. Vatican I was formally closed only in 1960, by John XXIII, as he prepared to call another council.

The consequence of that interruption is a doctrinal imbalance that shaped Catholic life for ninety years. The council defined the authority of the pope and had no opportunity to define the place of bishops, of local churches or of the laity beside it. What was intended as one chapter stood alone as though it were the whole.

Vatican II is best read as the completion of that unfinished business. Its constitution on the church sets episcopal collegiality beside papal primacy, teaches that bishops succeed the apostles as a body, and describes the church as the whole people of God before it describes its hierarchy. Neither council reversed the other. The second supplied the context the first had been prevented from providing, which is why Catholic theologians routinely insist the two must be read together.