On May 14, 1872, in the immediate aftermath of the First Vatican Council, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck circulated the following note to the German representatives in the neighbouring European states:
The concordats already concluded at the beginning of the century produced direct and, to some extent, intimate relations between the Pope and governments, but, above all, the Vatican Council, and both of its most important statements about infallibility and about the jurisdiction of the Pope, also entirely altered his position in relation to the governments…. For by these decisions, the Pope has come into the position of assuming episcopal rights in every single diocese and of substituting papal for episcopal power. Episcopal has merged into papal jurisdiction; the Pope no longer exercises, as heretofore, individual stipulated special privileges, but the entire plenitude of episcopal rights rests in his hands. In principle, he has taken the place of each individual bishop, and in practice, at every single moment, it is up to him alone to put himself in the former’s position in relation to the governments. Further, the bishops are only his tools, his officials without responsibility. In relation to the governments, they have become officials of a foreign sovereign, who, by virtue of his infallibility, is a completely absolute one – more so than any absolute monarch in the world.
As the text of this note indicates, the Chancellor was certainly much concerned with the definition of papal infallibility. But he was even more concerned with the accompanying definition of papal primacy, particularly as it conferred on the Pope ‘ordinary and immediate jurisdiction’ in every Catholic diocese worldwide. As the relevant canon of the Vatican Council stipulates (Denzinger 3064):
And if anyone says that the Roman Pontiff has only the office of inspection and direction, but not the full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, not only in matters that pertain to faith and morals, but also in matters that pertain to the discipline and government of the Church throughout the whole world; or if anyone says that he has only a more important part and not the complete fullness of the supreme power; or if anyone says that this power is not ordinary and immediate either over each and every Church and over each and every shepherd and faithful: anathema sit.
Bismarck’s concern with universal papal jurisdiction was that in effect it took German bishops out of the sphere of influence of the German Chancellor and government and made them immediately subject to the jurisdiction of the Pope. Their autonomy over their dioceses was compromised and they became ‘tools’, ‘officials without responsibility’ of the papacy, merely branch managers in effect of a religious corporation whose power and responsibility were in the Vatican.
A joint response of the German bishops in February 1875, contesting the Chancellor’s interpretation of the Vatican decrees, did little to alleviate Bismarck’s concerns, even though the response was specifically welcomed and endorsed by Pius IX in an Apostolic Letter of March 6, 1875. Instead, Bismarck’s concerns were further heightened when he became aware that the former British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, had published a pamphlet: “The Vatican Decrees and their Bearing on Civil Allegiance”. In this pamphlet Gladstone argued that as a result of the Vatican Decrees not only was episcopal autonomy compromised, but the primary civil allegiance of English Catholics was transferred from the English sovereign to the Pope. Although, as with Bismarck’s note, Gladstone’s interpretation of the Vatican Decrees was challenged, this time by no less a contemporary and former colleague than John Henry Newman in his ‘Letter to the Duke of Norfolk’, both Bismarck’s and Gladstone’s concerns were widely shared at the time and have continued to resonate with non-Catholic Churches over the next 150 years. They have constituted a significant theological obstacle to ecumenical endeavours over that period.
It was in an attempt to reconcile some of these and other differences that on May 25, 1995, Pope John Paul II issued an encyclical: ‘Ut Unum Sint’: ‘That they may be one’ (John 17,21). The encyclical was an invitation to the sister Churches, Orthodox in the first instance but also Protestant and Reformed, to join with the Catholic Church in exploring whether there were new ways to defuse long-standing theological and other differences and to remedy the scandal of a divided Christendom. Almost thirty years after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council and, from a Catholic stance at least, its ground-breaking Decree on Ecumenism, ‘Unitatis Redintegratio’: ‘The Restoration of Unity’(November 1964), John Paul’s encyclical was an attempt to breathe new life into a flagging ecumenical movement. The encyclical traverses the traditional areas where Catholic Christianity diverged from that of Eastern Orthodoxy at the end of the first millennium and from that of the Protestant and Reformed Churches during the religiously calamitous Sixteenth Century. There is an invitation to the sister Churches to consider anew the traditional areas of divergence and to enter into dialogue with the Vatican to see whether a more positive ecumenical attitude on behalf of all parties in recent years has generated possible resolutions of age-old differences.
One particularly neuralgic area of difference between the Churches is that which formed the substance of Bismarck’s and Gladstone’s criticisms of the decrees of the First Vatican Council, namely, not only the primacy of honour, but also that of universal and immediate jurisdiction which Catholics attribute to the Pope, the Bishop of Rome. So, it is hardly surprising that in a recent study document which the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity promulgated on June 13, 2024, this issue should feature in its title: ‘The Bishop of Rome: Primacy and Synodality in the Ecumenical Dialogue and in the Responses to the Encyclical: “Ut Unum Sint”’.
In launching the study document Cardinal Koch, the head of the Dicastery, said that, thirty years after the John Paul II encyclical, this new document summarizes thirty responses from sister Churches to ‘Ut Unum Sint’ and fifty other ecumenical statements published over that period, mostly issued after dialogue with their Catholic counterparts, e.g., Orthodox/Catholic, Lutheran/Catholic, Pentecostal/Catholic, Anglican/Catholic, Methodist/Catholic, etc.
Most of these responses advert to the obstacle to ecumenism that the decree ‘Pastor Aeternus’ of the First Vatican Council continues to constitute, especially in respect of the primacy of universal and immediate jurisdiction that the decree attributes to the Bishop of Rome. The current Vatican study document acknowledges these concerns and recognizes that ‘Pastor Aeternus’ is very much a product of its times. Thus: ‘Vatican I should be understood within the framework of its historical context….in the 19thcentury the Catholic Church was responding to various challenges. Ecclesiologically, Gallicanism revived the concept of conciliarism by placing an emphasis on the autonomy of national Churches. Politically, the Church was challenged by regalism (an increased state control of the Church) and by the growing influence of an anticlerical liberalism. Intellectually, rationalism and modern scientific developments raised questions about the traditional formulations of the faith. In reaction to these challenges and as a counter to them, the ultramontane movement promoted the leadership of the Pope and the creation of a more centralized church modelled on contemporary political regimes of sovereignty’ (pp. 41-42).
The study document also recognized the further complication that the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war brought the Council to a premature end. This in turn resulted in an imbalanced ecclesiology in that the definitions of universal papal jurisdiction and papal infallibility were not balanced by corresponding statements of the rights and responsibilities of bishops in their own dioceses and by recognizing the significance and the importance of the reception by the lay faithful of papal and episcopal teaching. Inevitably Vatican I led to an increased ‘papalisation’ (the term of the American Jesuit church historian, John O’Malley) of the Catholic Church. This was only corrected in the first instance by Vatican II (the role of bishops) and, belatedly, by the current Synod on Synodality (lay reception of official Church teaching).
So, there are hints in this recent document that, even apart from the more friendly relations that currently exist between the Churches, the time may be ripe for a hermeneutical reassessment of ‘Pastor Aeternus’. Many of the responses to “Ut Unum Sint” speak of the desirability of a unified voice that may give witness to the shared sentiments of all the Churches in the face of the problems that confront the world. There seems also to be at least a tentative recognition that it is the Bishop of Rome who may be the official spokesperson on such occasions – and that not because he is the successor of St Peter, nor because he is divinely ordained to this office (both of these will continue to be disputed among the Churches), but simply because down the ages the see of Rome has exercised a unique leadership role as a matter of contingent historical fact.
If such a role were to emerge for the Bishop of Rome, it may be hoped that, even if universal immediate papal jurisdiction were not renounced, at least, like papal infallibility, it may be limited to more rare occasions. Papal infallibility has been exercised only once since 1870 (the doctrine of the Assumption in 1950), but exercises of universal papal jurisdiction and governance in a highly ‘papalised’ Church are still both frequent and specific. The recent Vatican instruction terminating the celebration of the Tridentine Mass in St Patrick’s Cathedral is a prime example of Vatican officialdom overriding local episcopal authority. Let us hope that in a more decentralized Church which the current Pope is said to sponsor (even though the sentiment may have yet to penetrate to the lower echelons of the Vatican bureaucracy) the ghosts of Bismarck and Gladstone may finally be laid, and some at least of the traditional obstacles to ecumenism may be removed without respective ecclesiastical loss of face on the part of the contributing Churches.
Bill Uren, SJ, AO, is a Scholar-in-residence at Newman College at the University of Melbourne. A former Provincial Superior of the Australian and New Zealand Jesuits, he has lectured in moral philosophy and bioethics in universities in Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth and has served on the Australian Health Ethics Committee and many clinical and human research ethics committees in universities, hospitals and research centres.
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