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Could infallibility ever be repealed?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.