November 7, 2019 39
ican Council, as Pope Pius IX’s secular
rule over the Papal States in Italy was
being wrested from him by the forces
of the Italian Risorgimento. The coun-
cil was broken off as the city of Rome
was being captured by the army of
Raffaele Cardona. In Va tican I: The
Council and the Making of the Ultra-
montane Church (2018), O’Malley
traces how Catholics in Europe, look-
ing ultra montes—“over the Alps”—to
a Rome-centered church, dominated
the council. The fanatical ardor of
ultra montanes was demonstrated by
a scene O’Malley describes from two
years before the council’s opening:
Matteo Liberatore, a Jesuit cofounder
of the Vatican journal Civiltà Cattolica,
wrote a vow for Cardinal Edward Man-
ning of London and Bishop Ignaz von
Senestrey of Regensburg to take at the
tomb of Saint Peter in Rome, pledging
themselves to promote a doctrine of in-
fallibility for Peter’s supposed succes-
sor, the pope—a vow they vindicated,
with the help of other ultramontanes,
at the council.
The Vatican Council was the culmi-
nation of “Trent” in O’Malley’s broad
sense. It finally reversed the Sacro-
sancta of Constance, declaring the pope
not only superior to the body of bishops
but infallible when pronouncing doc-
trine formally (ex cathedra). “Infal-
libility” has been used more often as
an aura about papal utterances than as
an actual assertion of unquestionable
truth. In this latter sense, it was cau-
tiously deployed only once, on a com-
paratively safe and long-established
devotion, when Pius XII declared the
Virgin Mary’s assumption into heaven
to be infallibly certified (Munificentis-
simus Deus, 1950). O’Malley, though a
Jesuit himself, gamely shows that the
Jesuits of the nineteenth century were
the principal enablers of Pius IX’s pre-
tensions to absolute authority. After
their order’s suppression and restora-
tion by popes, they were hesitant to dis-
agree with them on any subject.^2
Councils often have paradoxical re-
sults. Pius IX, by insisting that Catholi-
cism must be the established religion of
all valid states, made life difficult for
Catholics living in states with no estab-
lished church or with a non-Catholic
established religion (like England’s).
But this just led to Catholics’ work-
ing out a modus vivendi with political
authorities of various sorts. These ar-
rangements with a number of different
rulers led to acceptance of a separation
of church and state at Vatican II.
Councils also have backlashes to
their new doctrines or new emphases.
Opposition to the changes of Vatican
II began even while it was underway,
with Paul VI’s attempt to sabotage the
decree on Jews (he gave a Passion Sun-
day sermon during the last session of
the Council in which he continued to
say that Jews killed Christ) and his re-
assertion of papal primacy even as he
adopted the council’s plan for frequent
“collegial” synods of the bishops. Pope
John Paul II tried to dampen the en-
thusiasm for “good Pope John”—there
had even been some effort in the coun-
cil to canonize him by acclamation at
his death, in the original church prac-
tice—by beatifying him along with his
antithesis, Pius IX, in 2000. Both John
Paul and Benedict XVI were grudg-
ing in their acceptance of the council’s
liturgical and other reforms. They en-
couraged conservative Catholic groups
like Opus Dei (whose founder John
Paul canonized), Communion and Lib-
eration, and the Legionaries of Christ
(whose pedophile founder John Paul
befriended, though Benedict XVI
forced his retirement).Tod ayAt the end of When Bishops Meet,
O’Malley discusses whether there can
or ought to be a future council, and
answers the question with “a resound-
ing affirmative.” He does not under-
estimate the difficulties in the way of
one. He notes that Vatican II, which
was attended by just over two thou-
sand bishops, was held in the nave of
St. Peter’s Basilica; no bishops sat in its
transepts or side aisles. The number of
participants would be greater now, not
only because of new bishops from new
areas swelling their ranks, but because
of the need to include more of the laity
and the leaders of other religions cau-
tiously invited to Vatican II. Even
more pressing would be the need to in-
clude women in greater numbers with
new responsibilities (there were only
a few women auditors at Vatican II).
O’Malley notes that the council could
be contained (barely) if the transepts
and side aisles of St. Peter’s were fitted
out with acoustic improvements. But an
ampler place for holding such a giant
meeting could, with some major adjust-
ments, be the Paul VI Audience Hall
(which can hold 6,300).
O’Malley does not say what the new
council might consider, but no one who
reads the news or knows the facts can
doubt that the present emergency of
the church has to do with the horrible
priestly attacks on children and the
sinister protections of criminal priests
by conniving bishops. And that is just
one aspect of the church’s sexual prob-
lems. One drawback to pretending to
be an unchanging church is that views
and attitudes once adopted tend to out-
stay their usefulness or defensibility.
The church has accumulated a number
of ancient views on sex, including the
fourth century’s Neoplatonic depreca-
tion of the body. This view was con-
firmed at Trent by a declaration that
marriage is inferior to celibacy.
The celibacy of priests was a prob-
lem raised at all the “modern” coun-
cils O’Malley has discussed. At Trent,
where Charles V wanted the matter of
Luther’s marriage to be considered,
an envoy from one of Charles’s hold-
ings introduced a study in Bavaria that
found that “out of a hundred [priests]
only three or four were not secretly
married or keeping concubines.” He
concluded: “Better a healthy mar-
ried life than an infected singleness
(contaminatus caelibatus).” At both
Vatican councils, the presence of mar-
ried bishops from the Eastern Church
was a tacit challenge to the celibacy
imposed in the West. At Vatican II,
Pope Paul forbade the consideration
of priestly celibacy, but Maximos IV
Sayegh, who had prepared a speech to
defend the East’s position, sent it as a
letter to him: “Most Holy Father, this
problem exists and is becoming daily
more difficult. It cries out for a solu-
tion.... Your Holiness knows well that
repressed truths turn poisonous.”The celibacy issue arose again at the
sixteenth synod of bishops in October,
with a proposed waiver of the require-
ment for men of proven virtue (viri pro-
bati) to serve in places with few or no
priests. This should not be surprising,
since a waiver was already given to An-
glican priests who could remain mar-
ried after becoming Catholics.^3 But
conservative Catholics find any such
change of the celibacy requirement a
move toward the “slippery slope” into
making celibacy voluntary for priests,
not mandatory.
That issue is just one aspect of a
general sex-craziness that had led the
church to declare a whole series of
acts to be mortal sins: masturbation,
oral sex, anal sex, premarital sex, con-
traception, homosexuality, divorce,
artificial insemination, abortion, stem
cell research, vasectomy, tubal liga-
tion, and coitus interruptus. This last
practice for contraceptive purposes
was condemned by a scriptural citation
to Onan in Pius XI’s encyclical Casti
Connubii (1930). Dorothy Parker re-
sponded to this idea by naming her pet
bird Onan because he “scattered his
seed on the ground.”
Scripture scholars pointed out that
Onan’s sin was not contraceptive in
intent; it was defiance of the duty of a
levirate marriage—having a child heir
by the widow of a brother, to continue
his line. Scripture is no longer used as
an argument against contraception,
but the rest of Casti Connubii was held
firmly enough by Paul VI to make him
ignore the recommendations of a “birth
control commission” set up by John
XXIII and continue the ban on contra-
ceptives in Humanae Vitae (1968).
Without a clear scriptural basis for
this extraordinary chain of sexual ob-
sessions, church authorities rely on a
goofy argument from “natural law”:
God made sex for procreation, so any
use of it without direct procreative pur-
pose is against God’s plan. We could as
well say that God made food and wine
for bodily sustenance, so any use of
them without a direct intent to sustain
life is thwarting God’s intent—there
go the wedding cake and champagne
toast.
The councils treated by O’Malley
have largely avoided the weird sexual
legislation listed above for a good
reason—and it was the reason bish-
ops tried to hide, ignore, or belittle
the crimes of sexual predator priests.
Open any of these sexual subjects and
the church’s entire constellation of
bizarreries comes into view. Can any
new council avoid an inspection of
this catalog of the absurd? But how
could it? The pedophilia scandal con-
tinues to explode daily, with secular
authorities exposing the inadequacy
of the Vatican’s attempts to handle
it. By now, this is a church-devouring
matter. It seems unlikely that even a
council could effectively take it on.
But before Vatican II, it seemed im-
possible that the church could change
its long-standing positions on Jews,
pluralism, liturgy, or episcopal collegi-
ality. The new situation may be hope-
less. But a council may be the one true
“Hail Mary pass” that brings back
hope—to the entire church, not just its
rulers.(^2) See my “Jesuits Admirable and Exe-
crable,” The New York Review, Febru-
ary 9, 2017.
(^3) See my “When Priests Marry,” The
New York Review, November 19, 2015.
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