Saturday, February 6, 2021

Jean M.R. Tillard on Debates among the Germans about Pastor Aeternus

  

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)