Was Vatican I Rigged?

How the Pope became infallible

As a violent thunderstorm raged above St. Peter's Basilica in Rome on July 18, 1870, the bishops of the First Vatican Council adopted a decree that would alter Christian history. A Pope, they declared, is infallible when he defines doctrines of faith or morals ex cathedra (from his throne) and such dicta are "irreformable" and require no "consent of the church." The bishops' lopsided 533-to-2 vote that day masked a deep division in the council and throughout the church. The immediate repercussions included the schism of "Old Catholics" and a wave of antichurch laws in Germany. Though scholars differ over where infallibility applies, the power has been invoked explicitly only once: in the 1950 declaration that Mary was assumed bodily into heaven. Even so, infallibility remains a fundamental obstacle to the reunion of Christianity.

Could infallibility ever be repealed?

The teaching was reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). But Father August B. Hasler, a Swiss-German scholar at the German Historical Institute in Rome, thinks it could be set aside.

As Hasler sees it, Pope Pius IX and his allies so rigged Vatican I that its actions may not have been valid. If so judged by a future council, the dogma could theoretically be bypassed.

Pursuing the story of what went on behind the closed doors of Vatican I, Hasler mined dusty archives across Europe for nearly eight years. His findings have now been published in German as Pius IX: Papal Infallibility and the First Vatican Council (Anton Hiersemann; $130).

Hasler disputes the contention that most Vatican I bishops went to Rome seeking the infallibility decree. Instead, he asserts, Pius and the bishops supporting him outmaneuvered opponents of infallibility --without ever answering their historical arguments against it--so effectively that the council "degenerated into a ritual, mock discussion." Hasler provides new details on just how the outwardly jovial, accommodating "Pio Nono" plotted to get his infallibility decree.

Ostensibly, the Vatican council was supposed to be like the 1545-63 Council of Trent--a meeting of bishops that would exercise its own powers. But as Hasler tells it, Pius IX, then 78 and determined to complete his struggle to centralize church control in his office, dominated the council from the start. He decided that the less anyone knew about Trent, the better; so when the director of the Vatican Archives ordered a review of the Trent rules, Pius fired him in a "raving scene."

The Pope's nuncios to various countries, Hasler reports, were told to cast aspersions on anti-infallibility churchmen.

The Vatican suppressed opposition periodicals. Alessandro Cardinal Barnabo, the tyrannical head of the Propaganda Fide--the Vatican mission office, which then ran church affairs in Asia, Africa and much of the Western Hemisphere as well as the Eastern Rite Uniates--summoned missionary bishops one by one to remind them that they were employed and paid by the papacy.

The head of the Armenian Antonian order, Archbishop Placidus Casangian, came under especially heavy pressure.

The Pope personally threatened him with dismissal if he did not back infallibility, had Vatican police search his quarters, and ordered him confined. The archbishop fled instead.

Pius, meanwhile, was putting strong pressure on other church leaders in private audiences. In one remarkable council speech, he compared opposition bishops to Pontius Pilate condemning Jesus, and pleaded, "My children, do not leave me. Cleave to me and follow me. Unite with the representative of Christ."

A number of contemporaries of Pius, including the French bishop who was dean of the Sorbonne, wrote that the Pope was mad. Hasler deals with the subject more delicately: "Many aspects of his personality suggest that he was no longer sane." Hasler discovered reports that Pius denounced opponents of infallibility variously as "donkeys," "betrayers" and "sick in the head." Once, in a screaming fit of anger, he put his foot on the head of a kneeling Cardinal, then lifted the man by his ears. Other papal outbursts supposedly caused four churchmen to die of heart failure. Hasler believes that epilepsy might have been part of the problem. Though most historians think Pius outgrew this youthful malady, Hasler found indications that his illness was lifelong.

The triumphant "infallibilists" destroyed much Vatican I documentation long ago, and most of what remains was secret until Pope Paul opened the archives on Pius IX in 1970. Even so, Hasler says he had to become a "detective." Though his is the first book based on the long-sealed archives, the church denied him access to much Pius material.

So far, Vatican spokesmen have not commented on Hasler's book. The German bishops, however, swiftly publicized a scathing review by a conservative historian who dismissed it as old stuff, biased and either "simply bad or slyly perfidious." A more friendly opinion, not surprisingly, comes from Father Hans Kueng of the University of Tubingen, who wrote a celebrated attack on infallibility seven years ago. Hasler's book, he says, "only confirms that the inquiry into infallibility is not yet closed." The church, Kueng asserts, "cannot avoid the issue."

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