ULTRAMONTANISM

ULTRAMONTANISM is the tendency of Roman Catholicism that emphasizes the authority of the papacy in the government and teaching of the church. Originally articulated in opposition to Gallicanism, ultramontanism stressed the unity of the church centralized in Rome ("over the mountains") and its independence from nations and states. Ultramontane principles can be traced to the struggles of popes and councils in the fifteenth century. The papalist position received a full exposition by the Jesuit Roberto Bellarmino at the end of the sixteenth century. However, ultramontanism acquired its definitive meaning in the conflict over the Gallicanism of Louis XIV in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The term ultramontanism seems to date from the 1730s, although ultramontane was used with various meanings in the Middle Ages. During the eighteenth century, exponents of ultramontanism waged a generally losing struggle against Gallicanism and similar statist movements in other countries, such as Febronianism and Josephism.

The French Revolution dealt a fatal blow to Gallicanism by destroying the monarchy on which it had rested. In the ensuing age of uncertainty, the attractiveness of the papacy as the only stable source of authority stimulated a Roman Catholic revival, of which ultramontanism was the essence. Count Joseph de Maistre forcefully expressed this position in Du pape (1819), proposing absolutism in state and church under the ultimate supremacy of the pope. The traditionalism of Viscount Louis de Bonald disparaged individual reason, for which Félicité de Lamennais (Essay on Indifference, 1817) substituted the "universal consent" of humanity, as embodied in the pope, as the ultimate test of truth. But Lamennais, developing the democratic implications of "universal consent," appealed not only to the pope but also to the people, seeking the freedom of the church in the freedom of society. Thus he commenced the liberal Catholic movement in the context of ultramontanism. The appeal made to Pope Gregory XVI by Lamennais and his associates on the journal Avenir was rejected (Mirari vos, 1832) by a papacy still seeking safety in alliance with authoritarian monarchies. Lamennais left the church. Nonetheless, his more moderate colleagues, notably Count Charles de Montalembert and Henri Lacordaire, were able to build a party, at once ultramontane and liberal, that supplanted Gallicanism as the political expression of French Catholicism. This party seemed to triumph during the revolution of 1848, securing its chief goal, freedom of Catholic education, with the passage of the Falloux law in 1850.

The Falloux law brought to the surface a latent division in the Catholic party, many of whose members had followed Montalembert's quest for liberty only as a means toward the end of the ultimate dominance of the church in French life. Louis Veuillot, editor of L'univers, led an intransigent group that rejected the compromises inherent in the Falloux law and advanced the most extreme claims on behalf of the church and, within it, of the authority of the pope. This new ultramontanism thus rejected liberal Catholicism, a product of the older ultramontanism, and set itself against all forms of liberalism in church, state, and intellectual life.

The attitude of the papacy was decisive. Although Pope Pius IX (1846–1878) had flirted mildly with liberalism early in his reign, he reacted sharply after the revolution of 1848, which had driven him out of his temporal dominions. After 1850, the church under his leadership regarded itself as besieged and embattled, hostile to all liberalism in political and intellectual life, and concentrating in the pope himself both the devotion of the faithful and the plenitude of authority. This was the final meaning of ultramontanism. Having already overcome Gallicanism, it now fought and defeated liberal Catholicism. Veuillot in France, the Jesuits associated with the periodical Civiltà Cattolica in Italy, William George Ward and Henry Edward Manning in England, Paul Cullen in Ireland, and, more moderately, the Mainz school led by Wilhelm von Ketteler in Germany were the leading exponents of a movement that rapidly triumphed among committed Catholics. The Syllabus of Errors (1864), a set of theses condemned by Pius IX, marked the height of ultramontane militancy. The definition of papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council in 1870 set the seal on its victory. However qualified the wording of this definition, it was manifest that the ultramontane program of a centralized and authoritarian church under an irresistible pope had been achieved.

From the First to the Second Vatican Council, ultramontanism was effectively synonymous with orthodox Roman Catholicism. The movement in its final form had won so complete a triumph that the term itself fell out of use.

See Also

Gallicanism; Modernism, article on Christian Modernism; Papacy; Pius IX; Vatican Councils.

Bibliography

Encyclopedic or reference entries on ultramontanism tend to be either partisan or unhelpful, but F. F. Urquhart's essay "Ultramontanism," in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, edited by James Hastings, vol. 12 (Edinburgh, 1926), is a solid brief sketch. Good extended treatments of nineteenth-century ultramontanism can be found in Wilfrid Ward's William George Ward and the Catholic Revival, 2d ed. (London, 1912); Adrien Dansette's Religious History of Modern France, vol. 1, translated by John Dingle (New York, 1961); and especially Roger Aubert's Le pontificat de Pie IX, 1846–1878, "Histoire de l'Église," vol. 21 (Paris, 1952).

Josef L. Altholz (1987)