Toward the end of his magisterial study of Catholic ecclesiological struggles spanning 1300 to 1870 CE, Francis Oakley employed a striking image to illustrate the victory of papalism over conciliarism. After Vatican I, the “solitary horseman” left on a desolate “ecclesiological battlefield” many centuries in the making was “none other than the resilient ghost of Bellarmine.”Footnote ⁷⁰ By this image, Oakley meant that Pastor Aeternus’ twin definitions of papal infallibility and jurisdictional supremacy represented the definitive triumph of the ultramontane school, as typified by the counter-reformation Jesuit Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. For Oakley—and in this point he echoed a common interpretation—Vatican I consigned conciliar and constitutionalist Catholic ecclesiologies to “oblivion.”

But did Vatican I really efface these traditions of ecclesiological thinking in the Catholic Church? There is no doubt that there were ultramontanists who wished that the council would do just that. However, the reigning interpretation of the dogma of papal infallibility was moderate, especially compared with the feverish ultramontanism then popular in many circles. This calmed the uneasy, like Newman, and allowed the last of the proud Gallican bishops of France to square their consciences with Vatican I's definitions.

Nevertheless, there is no denying that Pastor Aeternus was a crowning triumph of ultramontanism. In hindsight, the ultramontane victory was much more sweeping and far-reaching in the council's definition of papal jurisdictional supremacy than that of infallibility. And yet, the seeds of an ecclesiological balance were already there, in the proceedings and reception of Vatican I itself. For as Yves Congar correctly observed, the conciliar minority, that is, those bishops who either opposed a definition outright or believed it inopportune, were not heretics fit for damnatio memoriae but rather “the vanguard of Vatican II.”Footnote ⁷¹

Against those who see the ecclesiology of Vatican II as a mere window dressing of the centralized papal and curial status quo, the council yielded concrete fruit in documents like Lumen Gentium and Christus Dominus. Vatican II taught that episcopal consecration is the fullness of the sacrament of Holy Orders (Lumen Gentium §21), that the college of bishops succeeds the college of the apostles and possesses full and supreme power in the church, and that this authority comes from God (§22). Episcopal collegiality, which caused one of the fiercest debates at the council, was sketched in Lumen Gentium §§22–25. A renewed theology of the laity, emphasizing their baptismal call and the priority of the whole people of God, was a central component of conciliar thought. The laity can advise their bishops (§37) and they also participate in ecclesial infallibility, according to §12, which teaches that the people of God as a whole, through a “sense of the faith” (sensus fidei), “cannot err in matters of belief.” Taken together, this renewed ecclesiology of the episcopacy and the laity pointed to a more diffuse understanding of teaching authority and charisms in the church. Thus, the early modern concern, often voiced most strenuously by Jansenists and Gallicans, to locate infallibility in the entire church rather than only the pope ultimately bore fruit at Vatican II.Footnote ⁷²

This is not to say that Vatican II in any way repudiated the definitions of Pastor Aeternus. To quote John O'Malley, the conservative minority bloc at Vatican II “never really lost control” on the issue of papal (and, consequently, curial) authority.Footnote ⁷³ Indeed, the documents of Vatican II constantly insist they are in complete continuity with Vatican I and with Trent (although one does get the impression at times that they doth protest too much). Nevertheless, something had changed, and everybody knew it. Some hysterical “traditionalists” predicted ecclesial Jacobinism. Collegiality was, according to an SSPX publication, a “timebomb” (one that is now exploding, they claim, in the neomodernist pontificate of Pope Francis). In a similar vein, but on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, some boasted that Vatican II had “sung a new church into being” (to quote a cringeworthy postconciliar hymn). For example, Paul Johnson's popular 1976 History of Christianity argued that Vatican II “was, in effect, a denial of the dogma of papal infallibility” because it also located infallibility in the episcopal college and the sensus fidelium.Footnote ⁷⁴

Of course, Lumen Gentium did no such thing. Nevertheless, when the dust settled, it was clear that although Pastor Aeternus was fully intact, the “ghost of Bellarmine” was not the sole spirit from ages past that floated through the aula of Vatican II. Although the council did recover some central patristic and biblical ideals in an effort to “balance” the ecclesiology of Pastor Aeternus, I think it important to point out that one need not go all the way back to an often-romanticized “church of the fathers” to encounter such ideals. Before the stunning and unpredictable rise of a hegemonic ultramontanism in the middle third of the nineteenth century, early modern Catholics were debating and advocating ideals that closely paralleled those that prevailed at Vatican II. Whether they were Gallicans, Jansenists, or “enlightened” Catholics in the mold of Lodovico Muratori (1672–1750) or Archbishop John Carroll (1736–1815), a number of early modern Catholics were reading the same Scriptures and the same fathers as the twentieth-century ressourcement reformers. Returning ad fontes, of course, led these early modern Catholics to ask similar questions and propose similar answers to the theologians and pastors we associate with the aggiornamento and ressourcement of Vatican II. Concepts such as episcopal collegiality (though not called that in early modernity), infallibility as a gift to the entire people of God, the church as the mystical Body of Christ, the pope as a servant of unity rather than a monarch, the ideal of a local church gathered around its bishop, and the utility of diocesan and regional synods (sometimes including lay participation!) were all proposed in the early modern period. Many of these ideals were beginning to find concrete instantiation, but the catastrophic upheavals brought by the French Revolution and the consequent retrenchment of so many Catholics, especially in the hierarchy, halted these trends.

Thus, Vatican II's “balancing” of Pastor Aeternus should be read within the broader context of a church attempting to emerge, critically and carefully, from an era of ultramontanism, antimodernism, and deep suspicion of the principles of the Enlightenment and liberal democracy. This is why Josef Ratzinger could speak of Gaudium et Spes—a Vatican II document of tremendous ecclesiological significance—as “an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Ratzinger, allegedly the champion of a retrograde “hermeneutic of continuity” that effectively nullifies any real change, even spoke of Gaudium et Spes as a “counter-syllabus,” that is, counter to Pius IX's (in)famous fulminations against modernity in the 1864 Syllabus of Errors.Footnote ⁷⁶ In this cautious process of revision, Vatican II was not only harvesting several decades of reformist energy. The council was returning to the questions and agenda of many Catholics in the age of Enlightenment and revolution and reassessing them positively.

And yet, ironically, the Catholic Church is more ultramontane than ever. It is often said or implied that we are transitioning out of an era of Roman centralization and into an age of global Catholicism, marked by vibrant local churches and synodality. I am skeptical. The age of democracy and mass media has, perhaps counterintuitively, nourished ultramontanism, not least by providing fertile soil for a culture of celebrity popes. Countless ink is spilled over the lives, writings, and backgrounds of the popes. Smiling pontiffs grace the covers of magazines. Popular and likable actors portray them in well-produced Netflix films. Their teaching output, in both range of subjects and page count, is unprecedented. Post–Vatican I popes fill huge sections of the Denzinger doctrinal handbook, often exceeding the outputs of numerous predecessors combined. We are awash with papal canonizations. Since 1958, three of four deceased popes have been canonized (John Paul I is the odd man out; his thirty-three-day reign gave hagiographers too little to work with). This is not normal, given any “recent” standard. In the last millennium (!), only seven bishops of Rome have been enrolled among the saints. Four of these seven were twentieth-century popes, and thus post–Vatican I. Three of these popes—John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II—presided over or attended the council that supposedly “balanced” the one-sided papalism of Vatican I.

The modern pontiff tweets, globe-trots, churns out encyclicals, is slandered and adored in the media and the blogosphere, canonizes saints at a bewildering pace, leads a number of ecumenical and interreligious dialogues, and gives extended interviews. The teaching of the pope, his personality, and his episcopal and other appointments shape the modern, global Catholic Church in immediate, profound, and direct ways. As late as 1829, only twenty-four of six hundred forty-six Latin Rite bishops were directly appointed by the pope. Now virtually all of them are. The most powerful medieval pontiff, Innocent III (pope from 1198 to 1216), could never have dreamed of such direct influence over the faithful, not to mention over his brother bishops. Thus, although Vatican II might have “balanced” the picture on infallibility, Vatican I's vision of universal papal jurisdiction has careened into the twentieth-first century in decidedly “unbalanced” fashion. That is why, I think, talk of a “synodal way” is so increasingly persistent and yet the concept of “synodality” remains so amorphous.

Thus, it is important, more than ever, to ask questions about the exercise of the papal office soberly and seriously. This is imperative not only for the internal dynamic of the church, but, perhaps even more so, for how she presents her teaching and life to a curious outside world, one that is sometimes hostile, sometimes sympathetic, and often simply bemused.

The ancient and authoritarian institution of the papacy has—again, counterintuitively—benefited from democracy and mass media insofar as these modernizing dynamics have helped transform the pope into a cult figure. This is somewhat ironic because it was the nineteenth-century papacy that issued thunderous condemnations of “the modern world,” up to and including free press and free speech. Due to the seismic cultural, political, and technological changes of the last two centuries, pontiffs now have direct access to the (largely literate) Catholic laity. World Youth Days, radio and TV addresses, the availability of books, encyclicals, and interviews online—all these modern developments have given popes a direct teaching role, uninhibited by “Gallican liberties” or Kings or parlements, but also largely unmediated through local bishops. Now, much more so than in 1870, the pope is the “ordinary and immediate” pastor of every Catholic.

And yet, the ways in which the world has changed, from democracy and mass media to the widespread erosion of confidence in hierarchical institutions, have also fundamentally altered the nature of papal authority. It is doubtful that a “democratic mind-set” is a necessary prerequisite for mass religious dissent. It is certainly not true, for example, that Catholics did not reject papal teaching on a wide scale until Humanae Vitae and the birth-control crisis. One need only witness the decades of turmoil that followed Clement XI's ill-advised shotgun blast against “Jansenism,” Unigenitus (1713). Nevertheless, the widespread clerical and lay rejection of Humanae Vitae was unprecedented in living memory, and unprecedented for the modern ultramontane phase of Catholic history. As John Cornwell sardonically but effectively demonstrated in his mean-spirited book on John Paul II, condoms found in the World Youth Day tenting grounds crudely illustrate what we all already knew: that millions of Catholic young people chanting “John Paul II, we love you” did not, in most cases, translate into fidelity to the pope's sexual teaching (for them or their parents).Footnote ⁷⁷

In addition to the widespread ignoring of papal teaching, even among committed Catholics—whether on the environment, sexuality, migration, the death penalty, or economics—the pontificate of Francis has highlighted another issue for papal authority that is unlikely to go away any time soon. That is the ability, due to modern technology in general, and the internet and social media in particular, to choose a replacement supreme pontiff should the current one disappoint. This is occurring in crass ways, as some Catholics, awash in the venomous blogosphere, look to crackpot charlatans to color everything coming out of Rome as diabolical. In a more sophisticated vein, others look to disgruntled prelates and await not the next papal encyclical but the next hit-piece interview or homily taking aim at Francis. The severe erosion of confidence in the institutional church, in many ways deserved due to the diabolical sexual abuse cover-up, has contributed to the urge many Catholics feel to find their own popes if they don't like the current one. Vatican II's vision of a local church gathered around its bishop who is the primary teacher of the faithful did not and could not have foreseen the situation we are in. For many Catholics, papal teaching is not received and interpreted by local bishops (much less theologians) but by their favorite blog or YouTube channel.

It is my view that what the church needs now is a sensibility that recovers the happier instincts of Gallicanism while avoiding its pitfalls. That term evokes images of royal despots and quarrelsome parlements, so I evoke it with a certain amount of trepidation. This vision would not entail any sort of Erastianism or ecclesiastical nationalism, nor any denials of settled doctrine (rightly and strictly interpreted) on the papacy. I see in the happier instincts of Gallicanism a church that is not fixated (with adulation or revulsion) upon the current occupant of the See of Rome, but upon the local church; that is, upon all of the baptized and their priests and religious gathered around their bishop. This ecclesiological vision—sketched, I think, by the ressourcement theologians of the Second Vatican Council—would revive the patristic view of the papal office. That view casts the pope not as some kind of prophetic oracle or supra-episcopal monarch but as a humble successor of the Apostle Peter, the visible sign and bond of unity between episcopal brothers. The Bishop of Rome no doubt has an irreplaceable role as a special guardian of the treasures of Scripture and tradition. He protects the faith, but he is not above it. Only some sort of vision of humble leadership could begin to restore confidence, in some small way, in a hierarchical church so mired in heartrending and sinful scandals of leadership.