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V. Balance and Imbalance: The Papacy and the Contested Legacies of the Vatican Councils

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2020

Shaun Blanchard
Shaun Blanchard*
Affiliation:
Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University
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Extract

Toward the end of his magisterial study of Catholic ecclesiological struggles spanning 1300 to 1870 CE, Francis Oakley employed a striking image to illustrate the victory of papalism over conciliarism. After Vatican I, the “solitary horseman” left on a desolate “ecclesiological battlefield” many centuries in the making was “none other than the resilient ghost of Bellarmine.” By this image, Oakley meant that Pastor Aeternus’ twin definitions of papal infallibility and jurisdictional supremacy represented the definitive triumph of the ultramontane school, as typified by the counter-reformation Jesuit Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. For Oakley—and in this point he echoed a common interpretation—Vatican I consigned conciliar and constitutionalist Catholic ecclesiologies to “oblivion.”

Type
Theological Roundtable
Information
Horizons , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , June 2020 , pp. 133 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © College Theology Society, 2020

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References

70 Oakley, Francis, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church, 1300–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 216Google Scholar.

71 Congar quoted in O'Gara, Magaret, Triumph in Defeat: Infallibility, Vatican I, and the French Minority Bishops (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988)Google Scholar, xvii (cf. Congar, “Bulletin d'ecclésiologie,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 60 [1976]: 288).

72 This paragraph is adapted from my book, The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II: Jansenism and the Struggle for Catholic Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

73 O'Malley, John, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 311Google Scholar.

74 Johnson, , A History of Christianity (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 509Google Scholar.

75 Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal, Principles of Catholic Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 381–82Google Scholar.

76 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology.

77 Cornwell, John, The Pontiff in Winter: Triumph and Conflict in the Reign of Pope John Paul II (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 187Google Scholar.