BOOK REVIEW : Delivery of Analysis on Infallibility Is Flawed

Chances are, if you asked an American Catholic what his criticisms of this Pope were, he would respond with a list of topics in the realm of social ethics--birth control, sexual behavior and identity, certain medical procedures and the “right” to die.

If you asked a priest, he would likely dwell on Rome’s hard-line posture on rules constraining the clergy: celibacy, obedience and limited political activity.

Few Catholics these days would, unless reminded, think to mention the doctrine of papal infallibility--not because they agreed with it, but because it is not just now a sharp bone of contention. Yet if the book at hand suggests anything, it is that this doctrine, and above all its aura, remains the tacit operating assumption behind the resurgence of Rome’s old war against the modern spirit.

For that reason it strikes me that the question of papal infallibility could at any moment become the major Catholic issue again.

The assembly responsible for proclaiming infallibility--Vatican I (1869-1870)--is customarily contrasted with its liberal successor, Vatican II (1962-1966). But the irony is the earlier council did not originate in the papacy’s drive toward centralization and absolutism. On the contrary, the forces within 19th-Century Catholicism who successfully called for the convening of a council represented the spirit of revitalization.

Moderates such as Archbishop Darboy of Paris may be forgiven their tactical mistake. In the two millennia of its history, the church had called only 19 ecumenical councils, and most of them ended up, sooner rather than later, escaping the strict control of Pope and Curia.

Such did not happen in 1869-1870. Those who greeted the council as the occasion to return the papal office to merely titular primacy, to restore the traditional rights of national bishops’ conferences, to modify the rule of priestly celibacy, to admit the use of the vernacular and to increase the role of laity in church affairs were quickly outmaneuvered and stifled by prelates who bore what Lord Acton called “the stamp of an intolerant age.” The winners who left Rome in the summer of 1870 had successfully rallied around the cause of papal infallibility.

It is the strength of Margaret O’Gara’s book that she has very usefully unearthed and exhaustively analyzed certain anti-absolutist themes of which we shall likely be hearing a good deal more one of these days: Is there a biblical basis for a doctrine of the separate infallibility of the pontiff, as distinct from the inerrancy that Jesus seems to have promised the church in general? If there is, is it a good idea to promulgate such a doctrine? Do not its inconveniences and ambiguities outweigh its value?

Professor O’Gara’s thesis is that the rear-guard action mounted by the French moderates ultimately paid off in a kind of “triumph in defeat,” both in the wording of the final statement--which was not nearly as separate, personal and absolute as it might have been--and in the repertoire of arguments the moderates furnished favoring the kind of collegiality that ultimately prevailed at Vatican II.

These conclusions are not so much incorrect as they are difficult to sustain in the book as O’Gara conceived and delivered it. Being mainly a philosophical analysis of written arguments, “Triumph in Defeat” never shows us how the French minority actually acted in the tortuous, tortured months of the council.

If it had, it would have required O’Gara to set her subject in truer perspective. For the impression she gives that the progressive forces at Vatican I mainly spoke French is very lopsided at best. The arguments and the action of other minority groups--notably the German bishops and theologians--proved more effective in the short term and more radical (and relevant) for posterity.

Even in O’Gara’s loving hands, the reasonings of bishops such as Dupanloup and Darboy come off as tentative, tepid and ambivalent, half sunk in the very Romanism which they opposed. Too often, what muscle these bishops flexed came from a very illiberal, worn-out French nationalism (Gallicanism). If their arguments may be said to have “triumphed,” it is because they were buttressed by the more truly radical thinking of the Germans. It was the latter who more successfully posed questions, drew conclusions and developed concepts and procedures (notably in the scientific study of Scripture) that would benefit liberal Catholic posterity in the ongoing resistance to papal absolutism.

TRIUMPH IN DEFEAT:

Infallibility, Vatican I,

and the French Minority Bishops

by Margaret O’Gara

The Catholic University

of America Press

$48.95, 296 pages