Papal Infallibility and the Irish

'Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove!'

With Pope Francis laid to rest in the simple, zinc-lined wooden coffin he so willed, the papal conclave to choose his successor is now imminent.

Debate and discussion about the Catholic Church and its ancient ways have inevitably returned to the fore. The concept of papal infallibility, as ever, is a favourite among the topics.

Who made the pope infallible? The Man Above, of course.

Grand. Who made him infallible down here? Officially, he has always been. Vicar of Christ, Shepard of his flock, and so on. It was at the Ecumenical Council of 1869-1870, however, that the infallible authority of Pope Pius IX, of all the popes who went before, and of all of those who would come after him, was formally acknowledged¹.

Vatican One, as the gathering is known, was the first Ecumenical Council in over 300 years. An Ecumenical Council isn’t much of a council in the Irish sense of the word - we seem to have an upper limit to one’s size, Tipperary at one point needing two county councils. No. An Ecumenical Council is much more continental, shall we say. It convenes its delegates from the whole of the oikoumene - the entire known world.

The First Vatican Council - Artist Unknown

Men of the cloth in their hundreds descended upon the Holy See - cardinals, bishops, abbots, the whole lot - to decide how to steer the Church through the enduring turbulence of post-reformation Europe and the age of revolution.

The Council of Trent, 1545-1563, was the last such Ecumenical Council, and the first held after Martin Luther kicked off the Protestant reformation at the tail end of 1517.² The Papacy came out swinging at Trent. Not only were concessions to Protestantism not made, the Catholic Church sought to further consolidate its power over those who remained faithful. The Inquisition’s expansion to targeting Protestants was maintained, the Seven Sacraments upheld, the principles of transubstantiation - that the Holy communion sacraments of bread and wine become the actual body and blood of Christ - affirmed, and it was duly clarified that faith alone is not, in fact, sufficient to gain one entry through the pearly gates.

The Council of Trent had seen three different popes at the Church’s helm by the time it wrapped up. By contrast, Vatican One was overseen by one single pontiff, the longest serving in the papacy’s history. The Papal States having been recently convulsed in revolution, and France and Prussia going at each others’ throats, meant Vatican One wouldn’t last near as long as its predecessor. But Vatican One’s impact in no way matches its brevity. Delegates gathered to decide how to steer the Church, and ended up making official and unambiguous the Pope’s prerogative to steer the Church by himself alone.

Now, where do us Hibernians come into all this?

The Irish put up a great showing at Vatican One. Of the 774 individual delegates that attended the council, some 70 were of Irish birth and another 150 of Irish descent. The oldest delegate was Archbishop John MacHale of Tuam, and the youngest Bishop James Gibbons of North Carolina, later Archbishop of Baltimore, a first generation Irish American. Of the tally of souls saved heading into the council, Ireland was surely on top.³

Amongst them all, however, Éire had but one native Cardinal. He was the first Irish Cardinal. Born in Kildare but made in Rome, his name was Paul Cullen.

Cardinal Cullen had immense clout in Vatican circles. As a boy he was educated by the Quakers of Ballitore. This school counted Edmund Burke among its alumni and years later would boast of Ernest Shackleton, too. Though he would remain “very friendly with the Friends”, it was not long before he was talent spotted by the future Bishop of Kildare, and shipped off to Rome for a University education - a good Catholic one - overseen by the Holy See.

Cullen earned his doctorate after a defence before the Pope and two more cardinals that would take up the Papacy in years to come. He mastered Latin, Hebrew, Greek, and most importantly Italian - naturally the lingua franca around the seat of his Holiness, and perhaps the key to Cullen’s advances in the Church’s ranks.

He served some time in Propaganda and then headed up the Irish College in Rome. Despite the numerical might shown later shown at Vatican One, there was a dearth of Latin and Italian language ability in Ireland’s clergy. Without the requisite tools in the diplomatic languages, Ireland struggled to wield much influence at all in the halls of power.

Cullen, therefore, seemed to hold a Swiss-Guard-Army knife. But where did his loyalty lie? With his Homeland or the Holy Land? Well, all good Catholics would surely say with the pontiff. Indeed, conflicting loyalties between God and Country was what sparked much of the debate that led up to the declaration of papal infallibility. But Priests are known to attend the confession box themselves, too, even those who fall short of committing outwardly Gallican heresy.

While he was in Rome, the clergy back in Ireland thought they had their man in Cullen. When he was sent back to the Island as Archbishop of Armagh in 1849, those in Rome similarly thought they had, in him, their own man too.

Cullen from his first days by the Tiber was enamoured with Rome in all its ‘liturgic grandeur’. His self-declared mission at the Irish College was to instil in Irish priests more ‘roman maxims’ and to better unite the Irish Church with the Holy See. Cullen was the antithesis of a Gallican - his loyalty lay with the pontiff and the pontiff alone. He was the Pope’s man. This loyalty, the only strictly correct one according to the faith, defined both his stints as Archbishop, and ultimately his time as a Cardinal.

The Irish clergy which Cullen returned to in ‘49 might be described as divided between two factions, the ‘Castle Bishops’ and the ‘Patriot Priests’. Granted, the former title is almost certainly pejorative and the latter adulatory, but it paints the picture of the schism that was present. Both were titles assigned by those of a Nationalist persuasion.

Since the Act of Union of 1800, Ireland was ruled directly from Westminster. Efforts to root out the Catholic faith through the Penal laws since centuries before had by and large failed, and Daniel O’Connell’s victory in a by-election in the year 1823 finally forced through the Catholic Emancipation Act, allowing Catholics to sit in Westminster. Though this would earn O’Connell the title of The Liberator, it would not solve many lingering religious, arguably sectarian divisions in society.

The way a given Priest approached and tackled these lingering divisions, whether he did so in a hawkish or dovish manner, determined which of the former two titles he would be ascribed.

Cullen’s ideology fell between these two divisions. On the issue of Catholic education, he was tolerant of English run primary schools, satisfied that being local run they wouldn’t successfully indoctrinate any students to Anglican ways. On the issue of Universities, he publicly condemned the secular ‘Queen’s colleges’, and got the Vatican to do so, too. Inevitably, when the warring Irish clergy factions couldn’t agree on a given topic, questions were thrown back to Rome to be decided. Rome, then, oh so frequently deferred to Cullen’s recommendation.

This clout followed him home as Archbishop. Bit by bit, Rome filled any open ranks in the Irish clergy with Cullen’s men. First overwhelming the Castle Bishops - who, in their excessive deference to the Anglican authorities, he thought too similar to the Franciscans and Gallicans that diverged from the Pope’s authority on the continent. But then, he moved too against the nationalist faction, led by John MacHale, previously noted as the oldest delegate to Vatican One.

John MacHale, christened the ‘Lion of the West’ by Daniel O’Connell, swung his pen like Anduril in his pseudonymous polemics. Such swings were largely through open air, however, and he carried little real influence. His sword might as well have been sheathed after Cullen consolidated his Roman smacht over the rest of the Irish clergy. MacHale predictably threw the title of Castle Bishop on Cullen in the wake of their rows, but his were the hurls of a man embrittled by the preceding fights.

More than quieten the Priests of nationalist persuasions, however, Archbishop and Cardinal Cullen sought to cut the legs from under the Nationalist movement at large.

With his old fella in mind, Cullen’s antipathy to the nationalist movement in Ireland is curious. While his father didn’t stand on the Gallows for Ireland, he sure near saw them. Cullen’s father bore his pike upon his shoulder behind Wolfe Tone in the Rebellion of 1798, and nearly faced a Court Marshall for his part. It was likely the requirement of an oath of allegiance to the crown that led the boy Paul Cullen not to Maynooth but to Carlow College for a spell before his transfer to Rome.

As an adult, Father Cullen considered the late Daniel O’Connell the ideal political leader. Nevertheless, he was dead against the Home Rule movement that sprung up during his time as Cardinal in the 1870s, and even more so against what he saw as the insidious, bubbling Fenianism that preceded it in the 1860’s.

More than seeing their efforts as futile and the blood that might be spilled all the while wasted, Cullen saw in the Fenians Irish Armellinis and Mazzinis, the Italian rebels who overtook the Papal States and declared the ill-fated Roman Republic of 1849-1850. The Pope fled the Vatican during this flash of a Republic, and only returned after the French led by Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon-Napoleon, laid brutal siege and threw the Republicans out.

Cullen successfully lobbied for a papal condemnation of the Fenians in 1870 and wrote more than once to Prime Minister Gladstone asking their Papers to be censored. One wonders what Gladstone made of such entreaties, given his own Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs once described Cullen as ‘the devil incarnate’, and previous British governments routinely lobbied the Pope to weaken Cullen’s powers. These efforts were in vain, it goes without saying.

Finally with respect to the Fenians, Cullen instructed the priests under him to deny the Holy Sacraments to anyone they knew involved with them.

The Fenians were one thing, but the Home Rule Movement? Here, we begin to see the darker side to Cullen. It is true to say Cullen was cynical of nationalist movements whatever their form. Even, or perhaps especially, democratic ones. Through them he saw insipient and creeping secularism which would lead to a repudiation of the Church’s teachings. Cullen’s opposition to Home Rule was less of this high-minded nature, however. In a word, it was sectarian.

Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Home Rule movement, was a protestant. Another Protestant, Isaac Butt, was high up in the ranks. This unnerved Cullen to no end. Cullen favoured a total separation of Catholics and Protestants in all institutional settings. Not just in education - the root of his push for a Catholic University - but also in hospitals, in prisons, in workhouses, and certainly in marriage.

Cognisant of the crimes the British committed in the 19th century in Ireland, not least their passivity in the face of - or, perhaps, exacerbation of - the Great Famine which drove a million to foreign shores and another million to death by starvation, it is easy to cast scorn on the “Castle Bishops” who played softball with the British Authorities.⁴ But if the Castle Bishops sought cooperation with the authorities, reasonable access to education for Catholics even if it was not dictated by the church, and, if not secularism, at least pursued a non-discriminatory attitude to different denominations, well, its hard here to side with Cullen over the Castle.

Perhaps it is in this worsened Catholic-Protestant division that Cullen’s enduring legacy on the Catholic Church in 20th century Ireland is most apparent. Through early political controversy in the Irish Free state over matters like divorce, to the Church’s enduring ban on Catholics attending Trinity College, his was a church that though perhaps not directly involved in politics, would control society to a degree that the men in politics would sign themselves up to a ‘voluntary theocracy’, as one scholar put it.⁵

How to Get Divorced in Ireland: 1920s Edition

Such were the happenings in Ireland leading up to the First Vatican Council. The stalwart support for the ultimate primacy of the papacy is known as Ultramontanism, literally ‘over the mountains’. In other words, it is support for the Holy Father’s ultimate jurisdiction in lands beyond the Alps. Beyond the waves, however, or at least the Irish Sea, the question of papal infallibility was a rather moot one. Though some, including MacHale, were against its formal promulgation on the grounds that the timing was ‘inopportune’ - that it would only drive more Catholics to apostasy - not one of the bishops of Irish diocese disputed the merit, the veracity, the correctitude of papal infallibility.

So, as continental Catholics prepared to debate infallibility and the consolidated papal power it would bring, its consequences for the Catholic Church in every Kingdom, Empire and Republic the world over, Ireland was fresh from very similar consolidation at the hands of Cardinal Cullen.

What better man, therefore, to define papal infallibility as the Vatican Council adopted it, ex cathedra, with but minor changes to his draft.

Tim Pat Coogan recounts a popular saying around Rome at that time: “Not alone do the Irish believe the pope is infallible. They believe the same of their parish priests and will beat anyone who suggests otherwise”.

Coogan quotes the phrase as testament to the Irish peasantry’s loyalty to priests in the 19th century as their “spokesman and bulwark against an unjust authority, an ever-present eternity”; the British Government.

But when the 20th century rolled around, when Ireland gained independence and that unjust authority was at long last cast off, the infallibility of priests didn’t go with it. Indeed, publicly, priests were still said to be infallible, even long after everyone had ceased to believe it.

Rather than loyalty, rather than faith to protectors, that local claim to infallibility was born of fear. Enduring, unquenching fear. Fear that silenced children, women and men alike. Fear that silenced entire families from speaking out against as archetypal sins as there ever were.

Father, Archbishop, and Cardinal Paul Cullen brought Roman discipline to the island the Romans never conquered. He struck it over the clergy, who in turn struck it over the people. It was his palette, if not his brush, that painted the Catholic Church of the following century as we in Ireland came to know it.

Paul Cullen, more than any other, was the man who made Christ and Caesar be hand and glove.

Archbishop, later Cardinal, Paul Cullen

Select Bibliography:

Paul Cullen, by Colin Barr, in The Dictionary of Irish Biography

Cardinal Paul Cullen - Dons, Popes, Brits and Fenians… by Keith Williamson in Slugger O’Toole

Vatican Council in the Catholic Encyclopaedia

John MacHale, by Colin Barr, in The Dictionary of Irish Biography

1. A curious side note here: the gospel according to Peter is not included in the four canonical gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John). Peter. St. Peter. The first pope! The theological justification for this - there is no dispute that a gospel titled according to Peter exists - is that the gospel was not written by Peter himself, but rather by others a few hundred years after the fact. But we now know that so were the canonical gospels! It seems his St. Peter’s own memories, as written down by others he - depending on who you ask - told them to, were not infallible.

2. Martin Luther, Tommy Tiernan quips, must have been the only man alive to look at a catholic church and say “you know what lads, ye’re having a way too much craic.”

3. The total delegate number is according to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, and the Irish descent numbers from the Cambridge History of Christianity. Though conscious that mixing historical sources to build such a statistical point is academically analogous to mixing Guinness and Blackcurrant, I thought the two sources of sufficiently high repute to justify doing so here.

4. That said, the Bull McCabe’s reminder that “No Priest died at the time of the Famine” comes to mind.

5. The prohibition on Catholics in Trinity must be the single most misunderstood piece of trivia amongst Trinity students. It is unknown how many have I heard decry that “They didn’t allow Catholics in until 1970”, not realising the ‘they’ was not the Trinity Authorities, but the Catholic Church.