Because the church is
founded on the apostles with Peter among them and not outside them, the bishop
of Rome can only exercise the primatial power which he is )in badly chosen
words) recognized to hold by safeguarding the episcopate of those who have the
charge of local churches, and by allowing it to be included in the building up
of the universal Church, the catholica. He would be acting in
destructionem if he regarded the universal Church as a vast diocese where
the bishops were in fact his auxiliaries of ‘vicars apostolic’, ‘bishops in name
but in fact just vicars’ as the bishop of Hippo, Mgr Felix de las Cases, put it
(Mansi, 52, 338).
It is important to
see that the bishop of Rome’s power does not operate in the same way at Rome itself
and ‘in the diocese of Gubbio.’ His function within the urbs, the city
of Rome – his own diocese without which he would not be a bishop, the local
church endowed with the potentior principalitas – must be clearly
distinguished from the true function in the orbis, the universal Church
arising from the communion of all the local churches. In the first case he has
to exercise that potestas ordinaria et immediate which belongs to every
bishop in his constant and customary dealings with the problems and needs of
his local church. In the other case, the Spirit of the Lord requires him to be
the sentinel, the ‘watchmen’, the memory of the apostolic faith among his
brother bishops especially, to keep them in faithfulness to their mission and
above all to keep them unceasingly open to the universal aspects of salvation
and of the Church of God.
This reading of
Vatican I is supported by Pius IX himself, and quite unequivocally. Five years
after Vatican I he was called upon to endorse warmly the declaration by which
the German episcopate reacted to a telegram from Bismarck dated 14 May 1872. The
bishops explained:
This telegram claims
that the decisions of the Vatican Council have the following consequences:
1. The pope may assume
episcopal rights in every diocese and substitute his own episcopal power.
2. Episcopal
jurisdiction is absorbed by papal jurisdiction.
3. The pope no longer
exercises certain reserved, limited rights as in the past, but he is the
repository of full and entire episcopal power.
4. The pope in
general replaces each bishop individually.
5. The people at his
own discretion entirely may at any time take over the bishop’s place in
dealings with the government.
6. The bishops are no
more than instruments of the pope, his agents with no responsibility of their
own.
7. Bishops in
relation to governments have become in fact the agents of a foreign sovereign,
of a sovereign, indeed, who through his infallibility is more perfectly
absolute than any absolute monarch in the world.
The German bishops
took this as a challenge to give their own interpretation of Pastor Aeternus:
No doubt the
decisions of the Council mean that the pope’s power of ecclesiastical jurisdiction
is potestas suprema, ordinaria et immediate, a supreme power of government
given to the pope by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in the person of St Peter, a
power which extends directly over the whole Church and so over each diocese and
over all the faithful, in order to preserve unity of faith, discipline and
government in the Church, and is in no way a mere attribution of certain
reserved rights.
But this is not at
all a new doctrine. It is a truth recognized in the Catholic faith and a
principle known in canon law, a doctrine recently explained and confirmed by
the Vatican Council, in agreement with the findings of earlier ecumenical
councils, against the errors of Gallicans, Jansenists and Febronians. According
to this teaching of the Catholic Church, the pope is bishop of Rome but not
bishop of another diocese or another town; he is not bishop of Breslau nor
bishop of Cologne, etc. But as bishop of Rome he is at the same time pope, that
is, the pastor and supreme head of the universal Church, head of all the
bishops and the faithful, and his papal power should be respected and listened
to everywhere and always, not only in particular and exceptional cases. IN this
position the people has to watch over each bishop in the fulfilment of the
whole range of his episcopal charge. If a bishop is prevented, or if some need
has made itself felt, the pope has the right and the duty, in his capacity as
pope and not as bishop of the diocese, to order whatever is necessary for the
administration of that diocese . . . The decisions of the Vatican Council do
not offer the shadow or a pretext to claim that the pope has by them become an
absolute sovereign and, in virtue of his infallibility, a sovereign more
perfectly absolute than any absolute monarch in the world . . .In the exercise
of papal power, therefore, absolutely nothing has changed. It follows that the
opinion that the pope’s position in relation to the episcopate has been changed
by the Vatican Council is completely without foundation.
The interpretation is
clear. Some of the phrases had been pronounced in open council in the name of
the Minority. But Pius IX was unstinting in his praise:
Venerable Brothers,
greetings and apostolic blessing.
The admirable
firmness of soul which in the fight for the defence of truth, of justice and of
the rights of the Church, fears neither the wrath of the powerful, nor their
threats, nor the loss of goods, nor even exile, prison and death, and which has
been the glory of Christ in centuries past, has ever since remained her special
character and the evident proof that in this Church alone may be found that
true and noble liberty whose name is heard everywhere today, but which in truth
is to be met nowhere else.
You have again upheld
the glory of the Church, venerable Brothers, when you undertook to expound the
true meaning of the decrees of the Vatican Council so artificially distorted in
a circular which has been made public, and thus prevented the faithful from
developing wrong ideas and ensuring that an odious falsification should not
provide an opportunity for preventing the free choice of a new pontiff.
Your corporate
declaration is marked by clarity and exactness so that it leaves nothing to be
desired, that it has been a great source of joy to us and that there is no need
for us to add anything to it. But the lies asserted in some periodicals require
of us a more solemn testimonial of our approval for, in order to maintain the
assertions in the said circular which you have refuted, they have had the
impudence to refuse to accept your explanation, on the pretext that your
interpretation of the conciliar decrees is only a weakened interpretation in no
way corresponding to the intentions of the apostolic See.
We condemn in the
most formal manner this lying and slanderous supposition. Your declaration
gives the pure Catholic doctrine and therefore that of the Holy Council and the
Holy See, perfectly grounded and clearly developed by evident and irrefutable
arguments in such a way as to demonstrate to every man of good faith that, in
the decrees under attack, there is absolutely nothing which is new or which
changes anything in the relations which have existed until now, or which could
provide a pretext for further oppression of the Church or for hindering the election
of a new pontiff.
In a consistorial
allocution delivered 15 March 1875, Pius IX spoke of the distortion of the
meaning of Vatican I by the German authorities and praised the declaration of
the episcopate which had refuted false and trivial doctrines. (Jean M.R.
Tillard, The Bishop of Rome [trans. John De Satgé; London: SPCK Press,
1983], 138-41)
