They knew they were right

Pope Pius IX, to the ‘liberal’ mind, is the archetypal Catholic reactionary. When the present Pope beatified him, it was seen by his own critics inside the Church (a dwindling but, as John Cornwell’s latest anti-papal offensive demonstrates, increasingly ill-tempered band) as the final proof of their now largely discredited claim that the underlying purpose of John Paul’s pontif-icate has been to reverse the reforms of the second Vatican Council and to ‘restore’ the Church to what the first Vatican Council, the Council of Pio Nono, had made it.

The fretful tone of such attacks is conveyed faithfully enough in Cornwell’s The Pope in Winter, which is subtitled ‘The Dark Face of John Paul’s Papacy’ (though he makes it plain enough that he doesn’t think there is much of a light face). Predictably, Pio Nono is one article of indictment:

An early item of poor judgment and the presumptuous influence of reactionary aides,’ he charges, ‘was the announcement made by the pope …. that Pius IX, Pio Nono, was to be beatified in the autumn of the jubilee year …. He was chiefly famous for calling the First Vatican Council, which declared the dogma of papal infallibility and papal primacy, although he was known for his infamous Syllabus of Errors which denounced democracy, pluralism, workers’ unions and newspapers. A fine exemplar for the 21st century to be sure!’

Such writing (a typical enough specimen of the general level of Cornwell’s analysis throughout) is so crass, and at so many levels, that it is difficult to know where to begin. We are told that Vatican I ‘declared the dogma of papal infallibility and papal primacy’, as though they were the same thing. But papal primacy, from the earliest centuries, had been taken for granted: it was no purpose of the Council to ‘declare’ it.