Recusant Constitutionalist Ultramontanism: Rhetorical Practice at Clongowes Wood and Holy Cross, 1814–1920

chapter 6 Recusant Constitutionalist Ultramontanism: Rhetorical Practice at Clongowes Wood and Holy Cross, 1814–1920

Thomas R.E. Murphy

All the well-being of Christianity and of the whole world depends on the proper education of youth. pedro de ribadeneyra, s.j., to Philip ii of Spain (1556)1 ∵

In 1814, Pope Pius vii (r.1800–23) restored the Society of Jesus forty-one years after its suppression. In the century and a half of the restoration era (before Vatican Council ii [1962–65]), Jesuits were closely allied with the centraliz- ing or “ultramontane” papacy that emerged following the French Revolution (1789–99).2 Restored Jesuits heartily agreed that the conditions of a modern, secularizing world called for strong papal leadership to safeguard ecclesial

1 Pedro de Ribadeneyra to Philip ii of Spain, February 14, 1556; in John W. O’Malley, S.J., The First Jesuits (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1993), 209. O’Malley notes that the statement “was a [Renaissance] humanistic commonplace. Ribadeneyra’s claim is notewor- thy, therefore, not for originality but for indicating that the faith in the formative powers of good literature promulgated by the humanist movement found powerful echo in the Society [of Jesus]. That faith motivated Jesuits, and they used it to motivate others.” 2 “Ultramontanism looked ‘beyond the mountains’ of the Alps, beyond national churches, and most especially beyond Gallican Paris to the pope in Rome for the centre of a cosmopolitan ‘Roman Catholicism’—transnational identity in the age of nationalism.” Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 5; see also 27–35 for ultramontanist culture. For overviews, see Jeffrey von Arx, ed., Varieties of Ultramontanism (Washington, dc: Catholic University of Ameri- ca Press, 1998); Ralph William Franklin, Nineteenth-Century Churches: The History of a New Catholicism in Württemburg, England, and France (New York: Garland, 1987); Richard F. Costigan, “Tradition and the Beginning of the Ultramontane Movement,” Irish Theological Quarterly 48 (1981): 27–46; and Bernard Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition: Aspects of Catholic Thought in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

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liberty. Indeed, a primary reason for restoring the Jesuits was their usefulness in combating the radically new realities of the nineteenth century. As historian Jonathan Wright notes:

But just as the Jesuits’ suppression was largely the result of unhelpful political circumstances, so its return can best be explained by a major shift in Europe’s political orientation: while the Jesuit Order had been slum- bering, the French Revolution had happened. The nations that had cast the Jesuits out now confronted the legacy and (as they perceived it) the continued menace of anticlericalism, secularism, and republicanism. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, the Catholic world was des- perate to find ways to stem this ominous tide, to erect bulwarks of throne and altar. […] The Society of Jesus, which could easily, if inaccurately, be portrayed as the most conspicuous victim of unhealthy new trends in European political life, stepped into the breach.3

The ultramontane papacy enunciated an elaborate teaching on the proper re- lationship between church and state. In the ideal constitutional foundation, the Roman Catholic Church would be established by law with deviations from its teachings repressed.4 However, ultramontane popes also showed recog- nition that this ideal might take long to achieve. In the meantime, Catholics living under imperfect constitutions should offer what allegiance they could short of contradicting the Gospel. The appropriate analogy was the church’s eventual conversion of ancient Rome following three centuries of struggle: Christians’ loyalty to the emperors had eventually won them over. This ultramontanist view was particularly embodied in three encyclicals: Gregory xvi’s (r.1831–46) Mirari vos (1832), Pius ix’s (r.1846–78) Quanta cura (1864), and Leo xiii’s (r.1878–1903) Immortale Dei (1885).5

3 Jonathan Wright, “The Suppression and Restoration,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Je- suits, ed. Thomas Worcester (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 263–77, here 273. 4 John T. Noonan Jr., The Luster of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Liber- ty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 27. Ironically, just as the restored era of the Society was ending around 1965, Vatican Council ii changed the church’s teaching on church–state relations in the decree Dignitatis humanae. It affirmed an individual right to religious liberty. 5 Noonan, Lustre of Our Country, 27. See Pope Gregory xvi, Mirari vos (1832); Pope Pius ix, Quanta cura (1864); and Pope Leo xiii, Immortale Dei (1885); in The Papal Encyclicals 1740–1878 , ed. Claudia Carlen, I.H.M., 5 vols. ([Wilmington, nc]: McGrath Publishing Compa- ny, 1981), 1:235–41, 1:381–86, and 2:107–19. For recent studies showing surprising flexibility on Gregory xvi’s part, see: Christopher Korten, “Against the Grain: Pope Gregory xvi’s Optimism toward Russia in His Censure of Polish Clerics in 1831,” Catholic Historical Review 101, no. 2