Notes on Pope Pius IX and Science in Light of the Syllabus of Errors

Introduction

Few in the Roman See have elicited such strong emotions and evaluations, both in his own era and in ours, regarding guidance of the Catholic church and her wary posture toward modernity, as Pope Pius IX (1792-1878). On the whole, scholarship has not regarded his pontificate with positive regard, and often the criticisms of an ultramontane or reactionary spirit proliferate in secondary accounts.^[1] What I offer here is a partially revisionist view of Pius IX. I make no special claim of originality. I think it is important in assessing figures of the past that we move beyond their writings and seek out the trends and developments that were environing them. Certain dramatic developments in Europe, both politically and philosophically, contributed to shaping the pontiff’s attitudes toward modernity, of which science (as then interpreted) played a part. Personal experiences also served an undeniable role. Therefore, it was not science per se, but materialist dogmatism promulgated in European education under the guise of science that provoked Pius IX, and stimulated the harsh wording in the Syllabus of Errors. Were there perhaps better or other ways he could have responded to these trends? Of course there were, but that is not of much comfort to the historian.

The Early Years

Born May 13, 1792, Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti, of Ancona, Italy, Pope Pius IX held the longest pontificate in history. His occupation of the Vatican’s highest seat stretched (with a brief absence from Rome) from 1846 to 1878. Many accounts of his early life and career stress a liberality of spirit and ethos in his priestly and episcopal duties.^[2] Pio Nono, as he was often known, was “well regarded in liberal circles for his administrative qualities, good will, and avoidance of party spirit,” as observes one encyclopedic account. On the eve of his election to the pontificate, Eamon Duffy notes that of the finalists, he was regarded as the “more conciliatory and open-minded” of the options before the conclave in 1846. Winsome personal qualities, such as “a gift for friendship and a track-record of generosity” even toward opponents, and some policy statements as a bishop, made him seem as if he would become a reformer.

The use of the word “liberal” for this early period must be tempered however, given that the primary thrust of that descriptor was political. As an Archbishop at Spoleto from 1827 to 1832, then as a Bishop at Imola, he had spoken in favor of altering the status of the Papal States, then a point of considerable internecine debate in Italy, and he sympathized with the nationalist movement in his home country. During his first two years in the Vatican, he granted amnesty to some of the political prisoners and exiles, as well as streamlined the operation of the Papal States, even granting some new governing powers therein to laymen.^[3]

According to Aubert, et. al., the pope’s upbringing and context placed him under three handicaps. One was his epilepsy, which began in his youth and vexed him periodically throughout life. This Aubert connects to his hesitancy and indecisiveness until circumstances became pressing. The second was common to priests of his generation, a sub-standard educational formation. This he was able to mitigate by his shrewd common sense most of the time. The third handicap is that he was surrounded by officials in the Vatican who were very insulated from the developments of the modern world. They were, on this account, “uncompromising theoreticians out of touch with contemporary views.” The conditions to which they were insensitive included “the profound evolution which was in the process of completely altering the structures of bourgeois society,” as well as the need of theological tenets “to be viewed in light of the progress made in the natural sciences and historical research.” These deficits must be tempered by acknowledgement of his unpretentiousness and basic goodness, sensitivity and personal charm, widely acknowledged in the biographical literature.^[4]

A Sense of Siege

Political events began to overshadow any long-term trends toward moderation. The year 1848 saw Europe convulsed with revolutions and governments falling like dominoes. Italy’s crisis was an occupation by Austrian troops. With past sympathies for nationalist causes, many assumed the new pope would assert his authority against the Austrians, but he urged a course of church neutrality, given that there were many faithful Catholics in both Austria and in Italy. This, coupled with his reluctance to cede more of the papal territories to Italy, led to protests, riots, and even the public assassination of pope’s own Prime Minister. Revolutionaries mobbed his palace, and he escaped incognito on November 24, 1848. When Italy was declared a Republic in February of 1849, the pope urged the Catholic rulers of Europe to aid his restoration to power in Rome. Less than three months after the pontiff’s departure, the Assembly of the new Republic of Italy, issued a decree asserting that 1) the papacy would no longer wield temporal power in the Roman State; 2) the pope would retain “all the guarantee necessary to freely exercise his spiritual authority; 3) declaration of a pure democracy under the name The Roman Republic; and 4) the uniting of all Italy under the new republic.^[5] Still, on February 9, 1849, the Constituent Assembly promised that the Pope would have “every guarantee needed for the independent exercise of his spiritual power.”^[6] The cardinals advising the pope remained adamant that he could not compromise with such an arrangement, nor trust in such promises. This was a position with which he came largely to agree both in theory and in practice. Kertzer notes the hardening of the pope’s attitude by late 1849:

Listening to those who told him he had to adapt to modern times had produced only heartache for him and disaster for the church he loved. Parliamentary government and individual freedom, thought Pius, were not only incompatible with the divinely ordained status of the (papal) states, but inherently evil. It was a belief that he would hold for the rest of his life.^[7]

French troops besieged and eventually took Rome. After an awkward period of several months’ Roman occupation during which the French, in vain, hoped for the pope to make concessions to the republican spirit of the Italian masses, by April 12, 1850, Pius IX took his place once again at the Vatican.^[8] Leaders in the territory of Turin engaged in an especially aggressive program of secularization which meant the seizing of church properties and the dissolving of monasteries. The days of liberalism and compromise came to a stern halt.

Such harrowing events convinced Pio Nono that the modern world and liberalization were inimical to the faith he cherished. In order to protect his role as spiritual guide, he had to shore up his role as a temporal ruler over the Papal States. One biographer notes that, “Although expert theologians admitted that the temporal power was not based on dogma, Pius was determined not to surrender an inch of the territory he considered necessary to safeguard the spiritual power.”^[9] His forces dwindled throughout the decade of the 1860s as his ability to maintain real control over Papal States territory steadily eroded through the losses of battles both on the field and to the withering scorn of the European press. It is difficult to see the papacy as he saw it, for today’s popes exercise extraordinary global influence irrespective of the tiny geographical dimensions of papal holdings in Rome. For Pius IX, the papacy itself was at stake in the local battles over control of the Papal States.

Pius IX had a powerful bête noire, King Vittorio Emmanuel II (r. 1861-1878). He was declared King of Italy by an all-Italian parliament gathered at Turin, in May, 1861.^[10] While sometimes affable toward Pio Nono, the monarch held to an indiosyncratic Catholicism that detested clerics but at the same time longed to see miracles. One historian avers that the king “had not the least interest in theology and sometimes talked of wanting to shoot all priests.” Though more than once excommunicated by the pope, he hoped to be absolved by the one he labeled ‘that poor devil of a holy father.’”^[11] Given such powerful opponents, the pope’s beleaguered attitude and sharp pen take on, for the historian, the needed contours of nuance. Many powerful leaders both in and out of Italy wished to see the Papal States and their wealth carved up and redistributed, and for starkly non-religious purposes. When the pope’s French protectors left Rome to fight in the Franco-Prussian War in July of 1870, Victor Emmanuel seized the opportunity. The walls of Rome were breached by his forces on September 20, 1870. A month later the pope restated his standing excommunication of the leaders of the new constitutional monarchy. Victor Emmanuel allowed the pope control over the Vatican and few surrounding acres. The pope was no longer king of the Papal States.^[12] In that light, Eamon Duffy describes the pope’s oppositional mentality thus: “The absorption of papal territory into a united Italy therefore seemed to him a device of the devil to undermine the papacy itself.”^[13]

Syllabus of Errors

The most important year for a discussion of Catholicism and modern science was not the revolutionary year of 1848, nor during the first Vatican Council when, in July of 1870, the pope triumphed in the declaration of Papal Infallibility. It was the year 1864. For in this year, he used the sword of Peter to battle against rationalism, and any ideologies promoted as science yet used to abet anti-religious fervor. In that year The Syllabus of Errors was published, as an appendix to the papal encyclical Quanta Cura.

Some of the errors announced and condemned by Pius IX would not have taken the intellectual world by surprise, as they were mere restatements of positions long held by the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Significant erosions of biblical authority had been emerging in German scholarship in particular, that concerned not merely Catholics, but many Protestants as well.^[14] For example, Error number 7, if widely embraced, would have utterly undermined Christianity regarding its essential historical integrity:

The prophecies and miracles set forth and recorded in the Sacred Scriptures are the fiction of poets, and the mysteries of the Christian faith the result of philosophical investigations. In the books of the Old and the New Testament there are contained mythical inventions, and Jesus Christ is Himself a myth.^[15]

Less clear for the freedom of modern thought, including that of the natural sciences to operate, was Error 9, drawn from an earlier letter to the Archbishop of Munich:

All the dogmas of the Christian religion are indiscriminately the object of natural science or philosophy, and human reason, enlightened solely in an historical way, is able, by its own natural strength and principles, to attain to the true science of even the most abstruse dogmas; provided only that such dogmas be proposed to reason itself as its object.^[16]

Terms like “all,” “indiscriminately,” “solely,” and “only,” marked the pope’s reactions to the reductive tendencies of Auguste Comte’s Positivism, and to theological liberalization in German academic circles. Positivism reduced all disciplines to the procrustean bed of scientific categories and methods, and at that time was growing in popularity in European salons. Papal condemnation of a figure such as University of Munich philosopher Jacob Frohschammer, whose books On the Generation of Human Souls (1854) and On the Freedom of Science (1861) became a special target of papal ire.^[17] The mindset of the pope toward the relationship of faith and reason early in his pontificate can be gleaned from an encyclical Qui Pluribus, issued November 9, 1846. Here Pius had written:

For although faith is above reason, no real disagreement or opposition can ever be found between them; this is because both of them come from the same greatest source of unchanging and eternal truth, God. They give such reciprocal help to each other that true reason shows, maintains, and protects the truth of the faith, while faith frees reason from all errors and wondrously enlightens, strengthens and perfects reason with the knowledge of divine matters.^[18]

Efforts to protect churchly intellectual prerogatives from incursions of modern thought and the investigative techniques just then under development in universities now may seem like so much obscurantism. Yet at the time The Syllabus was written, the Papal States were under siege, so a siege mentality on the part of the pope is at least somewhat understandable, even if not wholly excusable, within his historical setting. While the language of the Syllabus is quite sweeping on the surface, E. E. Y. Hales has argued that Error 80, which seemed to deride the progress of civilization itself, had as its target “the Piedmontese government’s idea of what constituted progress and civilization with which the pope declined to come to terms.”^[19] Richard J. Evans has noted the following developments in the early 1860s: the widespread popularity of incorporating the Papal States into the Kingdom of Italy, a government that dissolved some 38,000 separate churchly organizations and took over their finances. Further, seminarians were now subject to forcible military service. Marriage was taken from clerical control and placed firmly under civil jurisdiction. During the revolution a few years earlier, officials of the Roman Republic had gone to many of Rome’s monasteries and convents, telling the religious inhabitants that they could now break their religious vows. Few, if any, had taken them up on the offer.^[20] Arrests of many bishops and cardinals continued to occur in the 1860s. Evans concludes: “The alienation of Catholic institutions from those of the Kingdom of Italy remained deep.”^[21] After the taking of the Vatican by the new King, the pope lashed out again in the encyclical Respicientes of November 1, 1870. He took pains to insist that the security of the religious prerogatives rested, for the papal office, on his unfettered authority in the temporal realm of the Papal States. “We protest before God and the whole Catholic world that while detained in such captivity, we are unable to exercise our supreme pastoral authority safely, expediently, and freely.”^[22]

Victor Emmanuel, still under excommunication, died in 1878; Pio Nono passed just four months later. The pope had requested to be buried outside of Rome at one of his favorite Basilicas. En route, hundreds of pro-revolutionary protesters tried to seize his casket and cast it into the Tiber River, yet were narrowly prevented from doing so by the police escort on hand.^[23]

Science and Progress

The Syllabus of Errors is a very poor guide for anyone trying to generalize about Catholic attitudes toward modern science. Doubtless there were episodes that have occasioned friction in that long history, a fact no one would deny. Despite widespread assumptions that the Galileo Affair, for example, was merely typical of Catholic attitudes toward science, the reality of the church’s patronage of scientific endeavors was actually quite positive. Many of the religious orders founded after the Council of Trent engaged in cutting-edge scientific research. Jesuits in Rome as well as Germany studied astronomy and quietly began to show Galileo’s findings to be sound. Researches in meteorology, geography, and mathematics were carried out by Jesuits, Benedictines, and Oratorians. Experimental methods became routine, and the missionary activity of these orders added to the growing collections of flora and fauna in Europe’s museums. Learning of herbal remedies from indigenous populations enabled the missionaries to advance the cause of medicine. In the same decade as The Syllabus of Errors, Monk Gregor Mendel was methodically laying the biological groundwork that would later flourish as modern genetics.^[24] Thus one may reasonably query if the Syllabus was truly representative of Catholic attitudes toward science generally, or represented a more specified and contextual aberration from a generally open-minded norm.

The matter of science came up more than once in the catalogue of condemned propositions, though the specific form of science the Vatican saw as problematic remained quite vague. Error 13 reads: “The method and principles by which the old scholastic doctors cultivated theology are no longer suitable to the demands of our times and to the progress of the sciences.” The blunt wording here could give the impression that Pius IX perceived theology as incapable of making progress, or of becoming more scientifically exacting, or of responding to the needs of the times. Yet two decades earlier, the most famous British convert to Roman Catholicism, John Henry Newman, had published his Essay on the Development of Doctrine. He had written, “Again, if Christianity be a universal religion, suited not to one locality or period, but to all times and places, it cannot but vary in its relations and dealings toward the world around it, that is, it will develop.”^[25]

It would be up to Pius IX’s successor, Pope Leo XIII, to chart a more positive and engaging way forward in the effort to re-energize and seek to utilize medieval thought categories in the modern world, a development known as Neo-Thomism.^[26] In an essay just prior to the publication of the Syllabus, liberal Catholic scholar Lord Acton sought to explain the importance of scientific thinking. He noted that the Catholic is subject to the Church’s correction when that individual contravenes truth. Basic doctrines are at the core of the faith and must be protected, such as “the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the punishment of sin.” Such must be explained by the church over time via her development of systematic doctrine. This core is not susceptible of being “destroyed by the progress of knowledge, the last defined dogma no more than the first, no more than the existence of God, or the immortality of the thinking being.”^[27] Around such core beliefs forms, over time, a shell of opinions. This develops “ . . . by its contact with human science or philosophy, as a coating of oxide forms round a mass of metal when it comes in contact with the shifting atmosphere.”

For Acton, the church must accommodate modernity or “put herself in harmony with existing ideas.” This causes difficulty in separating the two, however, “as opinion changes, principles become developed, and as habits alter, one element of the amalgam is constantly losing its vitality, and the true dogma is left in an unnatural union with exploded opinion.” Then Acton set forth the argument that doubtless raised conservative hackles amongst his traditional Catholic readers: “From time to time a very extensive revision is required, hateful to conservative habits and feelings; a crisis occurs, and a new alliance has to be formed between religion and knowledge, between the Church and society.” Such, for Acton, is actually a gain because it represents “a victory of truth over error, of science over opinion.” Perhaps with too much optimism, Acton rhapsodized: “It is a change not to be deplored but to be accepted with joy.” For Acton the danger of progress is merely apparent, to disappear when Catholics “break the bonds of human tradition, and associate themselves with the progress of their times.”^[28] To conservative ears, Acton’s distinguishing of core and husk in matters of doctrine sounded very like the liberal Protestant approach of Schleiermacher half a century earlier. If the Syllabus was soon to become something of a broadsword rather than a scalpel in confronting error, Acton’s liberalism stood at the opposite extreme, giving little mechanism for identify any error that might enter under the guise of mere benevolent progress.

One more alleged error in the syllabus focused on science, this time in the context of the debates over public vs. parochial education that roiled both Europe and America during this period. Error 47 regarding education reads:

The best theory of civil society requires that popular schools open to children of every class of the people, and, generally, all public institutes intended for instruction in letters and philosophical sciences and for carrying on the education of youth, should be freed from all ecclesiastical authority, control and interference, and should be fully subjected to the civil and political power at the pleasure of the rulers, and according to the standard of the prevalent opinions of the age.^[29]

The full force of the pope’s wrath on this point can be discerned by investigating the larger encyclical, Quanta Cura, which clarifies the objections that would distill within Error 47. The pope’s warnings against educational innovation waxed hot in the following passage:

By which impious opinions and machinations these most deceitful men chiefly aim at this result, viz., that the salutary teaching and influence of the Catholic Church may be entirely banished from the instruction and education of youth, and that the tender and flexible minds of young men may be infected and depraved by every most pernicious error and vice. For all who have endeavored to throw into confusion things both sacred and secular, and to subvert the right order of society, and to abolish all rights, human and divine, have always (as we above hinted) devoted all their nefarious schemes, devices and efforts, to deceiving and depraving incautious youth and have placed all their hope in its corruption.^[30]

Such statements appeared to presume extreme ill-will and evil intent on the part of secular educators across Europe. Frank Coppa has observed that it was the pope’s trammeling of such social “errors” that garnered the most severe pushback from the public and the press of that historic moment. “There was resentment,” he writes, “of the condemnation of the notion that public schools should be freed of all ecclesiastical authority.” The rhetoric of the document was quite sweeping, “and the condemnations seemed directed against the principles worldwide and for all time.”^[31] Protestant essayist Joseph S. Van Dyke wrote about the Syllabus in an especially scathing manner:

With characteristic impudence they claim for the Pope the right of abrogating civil law, of enforcing obedience to Catholic dogmas, of employing corporal punishment, and even of compelling princes to execute civil penalties for ecclesiastical offenses. They insist, in language not to be mistaken, that to Holy Mother belongs the exclusive right to educate the young, that priests are not subject to civil governments, that the Pope rules, jure divino, in temporal things, that the right to solemnize marriage is the exclusive possession of the priesthood, that Catholicism is the only system of faith entitled to man’s suffrage, and, accordingly, that Protestant worship ought not to be tolerated, and where it can be suppressed, as in New Granada and in Rome, must be.^[32]

Such debates over the seamless integration of matters political, educational, and religious may strike the 21^st-century reader as odd, but for a 19^th-century audience, such spheres were not neatly separated, albeit in the midst of a painful process of fracturing. McCool clarifies the situation by noting: “The theological controversies of the nineteenth century cannot be divorced from the Church-state tensions of the period.” Furthermore, such debates also impinged on “the relations between faith and reason.” Such social debates coalesced as “aspects of the one basic problem concerning the relation between grace and nature.”^[33] In Catholic thought in this era, nature must be, of its very essence, subservient to grace, even if nature carries its own integral status as a result of its created telos.

For all the broadening of the scope of the Syllabus of Errors, some Catholic scholars have been at pains to qualify and constrain some features of the document, by historical contextualization and careful attention to its original Latin wording or to its originating source materials. In commenting on the international stir the Syllabus caused, Franciscan historian Damian McElrath has urged that: “Not only was the positive teaching in many cases difficult to determine, but the historical context for the errors was hardly known in many countries outside of Italy.”^[34] Even an early-twentieth-century Jesuit historian who lauded the Syllabus against its liberal detractors acknowledged that “the Syllabus was an emergency measure intended to meet the attacks of the moment,” and did not even partake of the same authority as Quanta Cura, the encyclical to which it was “attached quite accidentally to facilitate distribution.”^[35] Such efforts at qualification by supporters of Pius IX serve as evidence of their perception of a need for damage control, and may hint at some latent embarrassment at the document.

A more recent and more critical assessment is taken by Donald O’Leary, in his fine work surveying the history of science in its encounter with Catholicism. He identifies two public speeches that tipped the scales at the Vatican toward the publication of the Syllabus, elements of which had been in development since 1852. The first was The Munich Congress of September 1863, and specifically liberal theologian Ignaz von Döllinger’s (1799-1890) so-called Munich Brief, which called for freedoms in the areas of science, history, and philosophy. The pope’s responses to the gathering at Munich caused the suspension of the Congress from its planned annual occurrence. The second speech to which the pope and his assistants objected was that of French liberal thinker Charles Forbes René Montalembert (1810-1870). In his speech to a Congress of Catholics in Belgium, the Count urged the Vatican to come to an agreement with the modern state, and to pursue religious toleration. O’Leary concludes: “The papacy felt compelled to reassert its authority within the church and to dispel any doubts about its attitudes on a broad range of issues.” ^[36] This was the proximate context prompting the publication of The Syllabus of Errors.

Conclusion

Pope Pius IX observed dramatic changes in modern assessments of science and religion in a short span of time. Such themes got caught up in episodes of violent confrontation with opponents both ideological and political, during an era when Europe was convulsed with revolutions. Educational experimentalism along with a swift-paced secularization favored even by some liberal churchmen of great influence created the perfect storm wherein the Syllabus of Errors offered a shouted warning. Add to this the realization that the careful editing of materials and presentation of the issues to the pontiff by the Curia sometimes occurred in a reactionary manner. The combination of these factors must be taken together to form a composite life situation for an influential document such as this. It is difficult from this cultural and chronological distance to perceive such developments as did Pius IX. Historical consciousness means at least making a partial effort to do so.

Notes

[1] Ultramontane, “over the mountains” meaning beyond the Alps from the perspective of most of Europe; became a term of art, and sometimes a pejorative, in the modern era. It represents an extreme version of the absolute authority of the pope, both in temporal and spiritual matters. One Jesuit scholar labels this more clearly as “the papalist standpoint,” and describes it thus: “The papalist standpoint does not recognize as legitimate any questions about the participation of the members of the Church, including the entire episcopate, in the making of decisions about policy or doctrine. The instinctive tendency of this view is to perceive any suggestion about involvement of the community as infringement on the Power, as some kind of attempt—overt or devious—to evade or depreciate the Power. For this reason the suggestion is rejected out of hand as being self-evidently wrong.”  Richard F. Costigan, The Consensus of the Church and Papal Infallibility: A Study in the Background of Vatican I (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 187.

[2] R. Aubert, “Pius IX, Pope, BL.” In New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2^nd ed. (New York: Thomson Gale, 2003), 11: 384; Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (New Haven, CT: 1997), 222.

[3] Richard  P. McBrien, Lives of the Popes: The Pontiffs from St. Peter to John Paul II (San Francisco: HarperSanfrancisco, 1997), 344-5; Thomas Bokenkotter, A Concise History of the Catholic Church, Rev. ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 272.

[4] Roger Aubert, J. Beckman, P. Corish, and R. Lill, The Church in the Age of Liberalism, trans. Peter Becker, History of the Church, Vol, 8, ed. H. Jedin and J. Dolan, (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 84.

[5] David L. Kertzer, The Pope who Would be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe (New York: Random House, 2018), 153. This book is an indispensable guide to the intrigues and shifting alliances that emerged in the wake of the pope’s departure from Rome and the effort of several nations to return him safely.

[6] Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (New York: Basic, 2008), 350.

[7] Kertzer, 292.

[8] McBrien, 345; Duffy, 223.

[9] Frank J. Coppa, Pope Pius IX: Crusader in a Secular Age, Twayne’s World Leaders Series 81 (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1979), 135.

[10] Norman Davies, Europe: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 824.

[11] Denis Mack Smith, Italy and its Monarchy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 7.

[12] Kertzer, 342-4.

[13] Duffy, 224.

[14] Errors 11, 12, and 13 seem especially pointed at the notions of a prominent liberal German theologian. See Thomas Albert Howard, The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Döllinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 111-12.

[15] The Syllabus of Errors, Papal Encyclicals Online, at URL: http://www.papalencyclicals.net/pius09/p9syll.htm.  Accessed 14 May, 2019.

[16] Ibid. Howard, 106, quotes the position of Döllinger at the Congress of Catholic Scholars held in Munich, September, 1863, namely: “The faults of science must be met with the arms of science, for the Church cannot exist without a progressive theology.” He held that within theology a basic paradox obtains, namely, that only through error can truth finally be found. His address, not surprisingly, was met by outrage from the Roman or ultramontane parties on hand or soon apprised of the paper, many of whom were already suspicious of the Munich theologian. In 1869, Pius derided him as “The Pope of the Germans,” given his resistance to the looming push toward a declaration of papal infallibility; cf. 138. Eight days before the council began, Döllinger’s book The Pope and the Council, was placed on the Index of prohibited books. When he later refused to bend the knee to the dogma of infallibility, he was excommunicated April 17, 1871, cf. 163.

[17] Howard, 83-4. Frohschammer was excommunicated by Pio Nono in 1871.

[18] Claudia Carlen, ed., The Papal Encyclicals: 1740-1878, Vol. 1 (Wilmington, NC: McGrath, 1981), 278.

[19] E. E. Y. Hales, Pio Nono: A Study in European Politics and Religion in the Nineteenth Century (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1954), 258.

[20] Kertzer, 196.

[21] Richard J. Evans, The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 (New York: Viking, 2016), 463.

[22] Carlen, 396. For a helpful analysis contrasting Catholic and Protestant understandings of authority that emerged in the late 19^th century see Brian Sudlow, Catholic Literature and Secularization in France and England, 1880-1914  (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2011), 192-214.

[23] Kertzer, 344-5.

[24] Steven J. Harris, “Roman Catholicism since Trent,” in Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, ed. Gary B. Ferngren (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 250-253; cf. Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 155-93.

[25] John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: W. Blanchard and Sons, 1845), 96. Owen Chadwick writes: “The idea of development was the most important single idea which Newman contributed to the thought of the Christian Church.” Owen Chadwick, Newman, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 48.

[26] See Gerald A. McCool, Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth Century: The Quest for a Unitary Method (New York: Seabury, 1977), 226-36 cf. Neil Ormerod, Faith and Reason: The Possibility of a Christian Philosophy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2017), 15-20.

[27] Lord Acton, “Ultramontanism,” in Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History: Selected Papers, ed. William H. McNeill (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 210. Plenty of people would soon undertake to undermine the existence of the soul in the name of scientific progress, contra Acton’s optimistic take on it.

[28] Ibid., 210-11.

[29] Syllabus of Errors.

[30] Quanta Cura, Papal Encyclicals Online, Par. 4, at URL: http://www.papalencyclicals.net/pius09/p9quanta.htm, accessed 14 May, 2019.

[31] Coppa, 147.

[32] Joseph S. Van Dyke, Popery: The Foe of the Church and of the Republic (Philadelphia, PA: P. W. Ziegler, 1871), 119-20.

[33] McCool, 27.

[34] Damian McElrath, The Syllabus of Pius IX: Some Reactions in England (Louvain: Publications Universitaires De Louvain, 1964), 323.

[35] Raymond Corrigan, The Church in the Nineteenth Century (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce, 1938), 176.

[36] Don O’Leary, Roman Catholicism and Modern Science: A History (New York: Continuum, 2006), 48-51.

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