hierarchy and the vetting of participating scholars to ensure orthodoxy.^24 And
then, on 8 December 1864 (the Feast Day of the Immaculate Conception), the
well-known‘Syllabus of Errors’was issued—one of the signature events of the
nineteenth century. The memory of the 1863 Munich Congress andTuas
libenterremained fresh in mind at the time. In fact, the‘Syllabus’, which
amounted to a compendium of past condemnations, cited Tuas libenter
directly in articles 9–14, which focus on errors of‘moderate rationalism’,
and in articles 22 and 33, which focus on‘errors concerning the church and
her rights’. Articles 11, 12, and 13 appear aimed directly against Döllinger and
the Munich Congress; they condemn the following errors:
- The church not only ought never to pass judgement on philosophy, but
ought to tolerate the errors of philosophy, leaving it to correct itself.—
Tuas libenter, 21 Dec. 1863. - The decrees of the Apostolic See and of the Roman congregations
impede the true progress of science.—Ibid. - The method and principles by which the old scholastic doctors culti-
vated theology are no longer suitable to the demands of our times and
to the progress of the sciences.—Ibid.^25
Onefinal note should be offered with respect to the context of Döllinger’s
‘Universities, Then and Now’. While the reception ofTuas libenterand the
‘Syllabus’was taking place in the late 1860s, a concurrent debate raged among
German Catholics over the appropriate institutional setting of theology. Some,
like the former Archbishop of Munich, Karl August von Reisach (1800–69),
insisted on the superiority of the older Tridentine model of seminary educa-
tion monitored strictly from Rome.^26 Many others, by contrast, thought the
time was at hand to found a new type of Catholic university in Germany (not
unlike Newman’s in Dublin), one that drew from the best of Protestant
examples, but differed from them in two respects: 1) they would (obviously)
have a different theological orientation; and 2) they would seek to achieve
freedom from state control. Put differently, they desired a free citadel for the
Catholic intellectual tradition, but one removed from the confessional statism
that had been the reality for both German Protestant and Catholic universities
since the sixteenth century. In this warfare of seminary versus university,
Döllinger, it should not surprise, came downfirmly on the side of the latter,
(^24) For the text of the edict, see Hans Jürgen Brandt,Eine katholische Universität in Deutsch-
land? Das Ringen der Katholiken in Deutschland um eine Universitätsbildung im 19. Jahrhundert
(Cologne: Böhlau, 1981), 418–20.
(^25) Denzing (ed.),Kompendium der Glaubensbekenntinisse, 793.
(^26) Erich Garhammer,Seminaridee und Klerusbildung bei Karl August, Graf von Reisach: Eine
pastoralgeschichtliche Studie zum Ultramontanismus des 19. Jahrhunderts(Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,
1990), 75–114.
228 Thomas Albert Howard