Writings by Dr. John C. Rao

The Complex Ultramontanist Fountain From Which Moreno Drank

A chapter in Gabriel Garcia Moreno, el estadista y el hombre: Reflexiones en el bicentenario de su nacimiento (Madrid, 2023)

Every account of the life of Gabriel Garcia Moreno indicates the importance of his Parisian exile from 1854 to 1856 for the further development of his political career in Ecuador. On the one hand, the future President used his time in the French capital to pursue scientific studies and study practical ways of implementing modern economic and technological improvements in his home country. Pregnant with consequences though these studies were to be for Ecuador, they were nevertheless overshadowed by a second Parisian impact that Moreno carried back across the Atlantic with him, one that caused him to view his more narrow, seemingly purely secular plans, within the context of a much broader hierarchy of values.

This broader impact was existential and religious in character, and it is said to have come upon the exile suddenly during a stroll with openly anti-Catholic and indifferentist friends from Ecuador in the Luxembourg Gardens. Having always intellectually been a defender of the Catholic position, Moreno argued effectively against his companions’ positions until one of them asked him why, if he claimed that the Faith was so essential to the maintenance of a good society, he himself did not actually practice it. “When”, for example, the man queried, “was the last time you went to confession”? Stunned by the revelation of his own obviously contradictory behavior, he took the rebuke to heart and began actually to live as he proclaimed himself to think. On the spiritual level, this meant that that he took to attending daily mass at his magnificent neighborhood Church of St. Sulpice, remaining afterwards to recite the rosary in its pews.

But since Moreno continued to be a man of the mind, and one who now was convinced that his understanding and application of purely natural knowledge could not be perfected without firm direction from his Faith, his conversion also led him to a deeper academic study of the substance and history of Catholicism. His guide on this journey was Father René François Rohrbacher’s (1789-1856), whose twenty-nine volume Histoire Universelle de l’Église Catholique, written in the course of the 1840s, had just been republished in a second edition in Paris before the Ecuadorian’s arrival in that city. What is most important for the purposes of this paper is that the spiritual as well as the more strictly intellectual Catholic influence over Moreno, both of which then provided the above-mentioned hierarchy of values for his later, practical, secular work as President of Ecuador, was one that very much drew from an Ultramontanist “fountain”.¹

Everyone with some sense of the meaning of the term “Ultramontanism” obviously knows that this refers to a vision of Church governance that emphasizes the necessity of strong papal teaching and administrative authority, and that it does so in a way that has often evoked either an enthusiastically favorable or unfavorable reaction to its claims. Our task here is that of demonstrating that the specifically nineteenth century Ultramontanist fountain from which Moreno drew his ideas was much deeper and complex than those focusing purely on its papal power component generally grasp.

Before we begin, however, let us note that even though the actual term Ultramontanism itself is by no means ancient in origin, there have been a number of eras in Church History in which its clear call for a strengthening of papal authority was proclaimed by extremely effective, organized spokesmen. It is also highly interesting to mention that these various promoters of the Ultramontantist Movement at least initially did not come from inside the Papal Court itself. In fact, Rome has generally been quite slow in responding to appeals for an increase in the claims and activity of the Holy See. Yes, periods of reinvigorated papal teaching and action eventually did arouse enthusiastic support from popes and their immediate advisors themselves. Nevertheless, once again, the stimuli have always first emerged from external sources.

The first of these pro-papal stimuli arrived in the form of a mass of eastern exiles such as St. Maximus the Confessor (580-662), determined to fight Caesaro-Papism, with most of the strong line of popes emerging from their impact in the century to come being Greek or Syriac speakers as well. A second had its roots in the northern European monastic revival, most famously represented by the Benedictines of Cluny, whose influence spread from Burgundy throughout all of Western Christendom, as they looked “over the mountains” to the Holy See and the need once again to fortify its position as the Supreme Head of the Church. And who can deny that the chief inspiration for a third era of renewed strengthening of the Papacy in the period of the Catholic Reformation came from the Basque Country and Spain, through the passionate, pro-Roman, crusading spirit imparted to the Jesuits and Jesuit theologians--- the non-Roman Italian, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621) included---by the founder of the Society of Jesus, St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556)? ²

Nineteenth century Ultramontanism was also predictably external to Rome in its origins. Horror over the ravages to all Christian order brought about by the French Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars, admiration for the nobility in suffering of Popes Pius VI and VII at the hands of their persecutors, and the reopening of the European mind to “exotic” eras like the High Middle Ages in which vigorous papal activity was the norm, brought about by the work of certain standard bearers of the so-called “Romantic Movement”, all provided spiritual and theoretical contributions to its return to the historical stage. So did the “practical” though unintended deathblow dealt to anti-Ultramontantist Gallicanism by Napoleon as a result of the Concordat of 1804, which restored the French episcopacy on the basis of papal authority and approval alone.³

It is therefore perhaps not surprising that it is to outsiders from the badly shaken French-speaking revolutionary world that pride of place must be given for initiating an open, public, literary call for help from “over the mountains”. This appeal was issued by the Savoyard, Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), whose work, Du Pape, was published in French in 1819. As Louis Veuillot (1813-1883), the editor of the hard-hitting Parisian daily newspaper, L’Univers---and himself one of the most assiduous “second generation” promoters of the Movement from the 1830s onwards---said: “When I was born”, “Joseph de Maistre blew the trumpet and I heard it…It is necessary to place him apart”, “among the great men, almost among the prophets….” ⁴

France continued to provide the chief fuel for the Ultramontanist engine due to the brilliant but ultimately vey troubled activity and legacy of the Abbé Félicité de Lamennais (1782-1854). Ordained a priest in 1816, the success the following year of the first volume of his Essay on Indifference in Matters of Religion (four volumes, 1817-1823) caused many to view him as a modern-day Church Father. His enthusiasm for a revitalization of the Papacy as the main key to episcopal as well as general clerical and lay political and social action; his hopes for a consequent injection of a solid religious sense into the life blood of the State, education, the economic order, music, and art; his mobilization of the press as a teaching tool; and his attempt to organize energies on the international level for the more effective success of a spiritual restoration: all these quickly touched many Catholic hearts and souls, stirring them on to militant action.

The young priest's charism can be measured by the quality of the men drawn to the Congregation of St. Peter which he formed and assembled at his estate of La Chênaie to study methods for resuscitating a dormant and seemingly dying Christendom. The Mennaisiens, as they were contemptuously labeled by their opponents, included in their ranks a large number of those laymen and clerics who were to play major roles in the Ultramontantist Movement, in all fields, for many decades to come.

Among these were Moreno’s guide to Church History, René Rohrbacher, Fr. Theodor Combalot (1798-1873), Dom Prosper Guéranger (1805-1875), the Benedictine founder of the Abbey of Solesmes and renowned proponent of liturgical reform, and Olympe Philippe Gerbet (1798-1864), the real theologian of the Mennaisiens and future Bishop of Perpignan. Two other figures vital to the movement from the very outset, Fr. Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire (1802-1861), the second founder of the Dominicans in France, and Charles de Montalembert (1810-1870), the creator of the so-called French “Catholic Party”, were to take a direction different from that which influenced Moreno, but important to our story nonetheless. Many Belgian Catholics, especially through the newly reestablished Catholic University, settled permanently in Louvain in 1835, were also early agents for spreading Lamennais’ ideas.

De Maistre’s Du Pape, although obviously based upon a conviction of the orthodoxy of a call for recognition of papal supremacy in the teaching and administrative life of the Church, was by no means a primarily theological work. This made it readily accessible to a wider public than would otherwise have been the case. It represented more of an appeal to the necessity of papal supremacy on a “holistic” level, so as to assure the reestablishment of a proper, organic social order that could successfully resist the unnatural, reductionist, and ultimately inhuman vision of life promoted by revolutionary Enlightenment naturalism as a whole.

Such naturalist reductionism was also vigorously opposed by those “Romantic” writers whose rediscovery of the “exotic” Middle Ages led them to appreciate the admirable coherence of its culture and to grasp the fact that its uplifting consistency was due to its union of all things natural under the guidance of the supernatural Catholic Faith. Romantic influences were especially important in German speaking lands, where De Maistre’s work was published in translation in 1822, and laymen and clerics, many of them inspired by or members of the Redemptorist and Jesuit religious orders, soon developed three main centers for spreading the Ultramontanist message.

One of these centers was in Austria, influenced diversely by the Romantic writer, Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), and the Redemptorist priest, Clemens Maria Hofbauer (1751-1820). A second grew in Munich, with direction given it by another Romantic and scholar, Johann Joseph Görres (1776-1848), with significant help from the Bavarian Monarchy.

Finally, the third and ultimately most important Ultramontantist German stimulus came out of Mainz, beginning with the seminary under Fr. Bruno Franz Leopold Liebermann (1759-1844), himself very much shaped by the counterrevolutionary spirit of the revived Society of Jesus and the classic Jesuit defense of papal power provided by Cardinal Bellarmine. The Mainz Seminary became a nursery of pro-Roman bishops in Germany, as did the German College in Rome, placed under the restored Society of Jesus’ control in 1819. Meanwhile, Mainz played a role in gaining a wider audience for the cause through a militant journal, Der Katholik, founded in that city by two diocesan priests---the future bishop of Strasburg, Andreas Räss (1794-1887) and that of Speyer, Nikolaus von Weis (1796-1869)---in 1821 and destined to survive until the very end of the First World War.

French and the German speaking countries were to provide causes célèbres for the growing Ultramontanist Movement throughout the 1830s and 1840s, all of them in one way or another focusing on the issue of Catholic freedom from State oppression. The most famous of the French battles concerned the re-foundation of the Dominicans and the Benedictines, and, more significantly still, the establishment of private Catholic schools, with Lacordaire, Gueranger, Montalembert, Combalot, and Veuillot all active participants in these struggles. Germany was most aroused by defense of the right of Catholics to be guided by the precepts of Canon Law, with a fury unleashed in the Kingdom of Prussia over this issue due to Cologne Archbishop Clemens August Droste-zu-Vischering’s (1773-1845) insistence on maintaining canonical authority in dealing with the question of the religion of the children of parents of mixed marriages. His steadiness in trial was celebrated by a number of Catholic writers, especially Görres, who penned a stirring work called Athanasius, published in 1837 and evoking ancient battles against Caesaro-Papism. But there is no doubt, however, that the Movement came to full maturity through the manifold experiences of the reign of Pius IX (1846-1878), which coincided with much of the education and career of Garcia Moreno as well.⁵

Four factors played their part in this maturation. One was the Revolutions of 1848 and the fact that the tottering of the legitimist governments in Germany and in Italy, along with the complete collapse of the liberal July Monarchy in France---all of them guilty of heavy-handed, Caesaro-Papist, State interference in religious life---heartened believers eager for more militant action on behalf of the cause of Catholic freedom. A second, contradictory stimulus was the subsequent recognition that various revolutionary forces that at first appeared to be in union with Catholics in their battle against oppressive legitimist or liberal enemies, actually themselves generally wished to control and limit Church freedom as much as and even more thoroughly than the Restoration governments. Thirdly, the Second Empire of Napoleon III (1852-1870), welcomed by many militants at its outset as being especially friendly to Church freedom, swiftly reasserted State prerogatives familiar to previous regimes, provoking renewed, disillusioned, Catholic outrage. And, finally, a number of the Restoration Era governments that had managed to survive the turmoil of 1848, the Kingdom of Sardinia (from 1848 onwards) and that of Prussia (after 1861) chief among them, unexpectedly made common cause with the more moderate elements of the very revolutionary movements that had initially threatened to topple them, to the long term detriment of Catholic liberty.

All of these developments stirred Ultramontanists convinced that it was only in closer union with an internationally-minded Papacy taking militant charge of a more coherent and stronger defense against international ideological revolutionary madness---now strangely allied with local governments and their narrow, petty, and often grandiosely unjust political ambitions---that Catholic safety lay. Their commitment to the cause was still more intensified by a deep and abiding love for the sitting pontiff, who was looked upon as a poignant symbol of the problems produced by all four of the factors outlined above.

For Pio Nono had shared their initial support for the general cause of “freedom” espoused by all those originally embracing the events of 1848, and had honestly engaged in dialogue with revolutionary forces. He, also, had endured maltreatment at the hands of these ideologues due to his failure to betray his responsibilities as the father of all Catholics everywhere, rejecting, as he did, the secularization of the Papal States and calls for him to bless an unjust Italian nationalist “crusade”. Like French Catholics, the pope also suffered badly from Napoleon III’s changes of policies, most importantly his diplomatic and military support for the Kingdom of Sardinia and its unholy alliance with revolutionary liberals and nationalists. And it was this assistance that led to the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 and the step-by-step robbery of all of the States of the Church.

It was really in the years after 1848 that the intellectual foundations of the Ultramontantist Movement---whose depth, complexity, and consequences for good and for ill we will explore in greater detail in the second part of this paper---were fully secured. Yes, more scholarly followers of Lamennais like Gerbet, followed by theologians such as Fr. Giovanni Perrone (1794-1876) and his fellow Jesuit, the multidisciplinary thinker Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio (1793-1862), were already active beforehand, but their contribution became still more significant in the years in question. Four other Jesuits---the Germans Fr. Joseph Kleutgen (1811-1883), Fr. Clemens Schrader (1820-1875), and Johann Baptist Franzelin (1816-1886), along with Fr. Matteo Liberatore (1810-1892), Taparelli’s editorial colleague on the journal La Civiltà Cattolica, founded in 1850---were also to be vigorous for decades to come. Belgium was to provide one of the most significant theological framers of the decree on Papal as Infallibility in the person of Cardinal Victor-Auguste-Isidor Deschamps (1810-1883), Bishop of Mechlen from 1867 onwards.

Taparelli, Liberatore, a third Jesuit editor of the Civiltà, Carlo Maria Curci (1810-1891, and Fr. Giacomo Margotti (1823-1887), a diocesan priest and the editor of L’Armonia della Religione colla Scienza from 1849 onwards, were to be very much instrumental in applying the theological consequences of Ultramontanist thought to a wide range of political, social, and broadly cultural issues. So were Bishop Gerbet of Perpignan and Cardinal Louis-Edouard-Desire Pie (1815-1880), Bishop of Poitiers, themselves in very close contact with their Italian comrades. Most of these thinkers were also inspired by the counter-revolutionary writings of the Spaniard, Juan Donoso Cortés (1809-1853). Meanwhile, in Germany, the Franciscan Anton Joseph Binterim (1779-1855) alongside the half-English layman, Georg Philipps (1804-1872)---known to many as the German de Maistre---worked theoretically on legal matters, producing pro-papal interpretations of Canon Law and emphasizing the state’s duty to respect them.

Journals such as the already venerable Der Katholik, and the more recently created L’Armonia della Religione colla Scienza and La Civilta Cattolica, were major venues for intellectual treatises. The Dublin Review, edited after 1863 by the ferociously militant Ultramontanist convert from Anglicanism, William George Ward (1812-1882) often printed pieces verbatim from such sources.⁶ Nevertheless, all of these periodicals, along with papers like the Belgian Le Bien Public, published in Ghent starting in 1853, were more than happy to take on popular issues as well, allied in spirit, if not necessarily always in the same often strident tone, with Louis Veuillot and L’Univers in Paris. The same was true of the rather short lived but militant La Correspondance de Rome, published between 1850 and 1852 by French clerics residing in the Eternal City. All of these organs of opinion promoted practical applications of the intellectual principles of the Ultramontanist Movement, manifold in character, as the second part of this paper will make clear.

By 1848 and its aftermath, a sizeable number of bishops could be counted upon to help make the strengthening of the Papacy and the intervention of the Roman Congregations in local Catholic life a reality. In France---where provincial councils proved to be a major tool for spreading the message and its implications---militants could look not only to Gerbet and Pie, but also Pierre-Louis Parisis (1795-1866, Langres/Arras), Thomas Marie-Joseph Cardinal Gousset (1792-1866, Rheims), and Louis Antoine de Salinis (1798-1861, Amiens/Auch) for support. In the German world, Ultramontanists included Johannes von Geissel (1796-1864, Speyer/Cologne), Karl August Cardinal von Reisach (1800-1869, Eichstätt/Munich), Konrad Martin (1812-1879, Paderborn), Josef Fessler (1813-1872, Sankt Pölten), Vinzenz Gasser (1809-1879, Brixen), and the extremely active Ignaz von Senestry (1818-1906, Regensburg).

Von Senestry was to work closely together for the cause of the definition of Papal Infallibility with Henry Edward Cardinal Manning (1808-1892), Archbishop of Westminster from 1865 until his death. Manning, perhaps Pius IX’s most intimate friend, was the most illustrious standard bearer of the Movement in the United Kingdom, where it had been effectively introduced by his predecessor, Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman (1802-1865), and where it was also enthusiastically stimulated by Paul Cardinal Cullen (1803-1878), Archbishop first of Armagh and then of Dublin.

Let us remember that these bishops had been active Ultramontanist-minded priests before their episcopal consecrations, and ordinary clergy and religious continued to provide major aid to the maturation of the Movement. Closeness with Rome in the general fight for freedom was one of the main themes of the so-called “Pius Associations” (Piusverein) and “Catholic Festivals” (Katholikentag) that were established and celebrated throughout Germany as a result of the Revolution of 1848 through the work of the Mainz theologians, Fr. Adam Franz Lennig (1803-1866) and Fr. Johann Baptist Heinrich (1816-1891). They were aided in this labor by another theologian from Mainz, Fr. Christoph Moufang (1817-1890), who also served together with Heinrich as an editor of Der Katholik under the vigorous leadership of Bishop William Emmanuel von Ketteler (1811-1877).

Meanwhile, in France, priests such as Fr, Combalot, who had founded the Order of the Assumptionists in 1839 after leaving Lamennais, preached indefatigably on behalf of the cause. Fr. Rohrbacher, teaching in Nancy, also kept up a relentless activity on its behalf. In Paris, a Holy Ghost Father and professor at the Seminary of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, Mathurin Gaultier (1803-1869), who was very close to Archbishop Gousset, is said to have been at the center of a circle---frequented by Garcia Moreno-----that helped to organize battles for attainment of Ultramontanist goals and recruit men to fight for them. Its work was vigorously aided by Cardinal Raffaele Fornari (1787-1854), Apostolic Nuncio in Paris between 1842 and 1851 and then prefect of the Congregation for Education until his death in Rome.

Mention of Fornari’s name and role brings us to the final element that needs to be addressed in this first part of our discussion: direct papal involvement in the Movement. Although Pope Pius VII was clearly aware and appreciative of the anti-Gallican victory won with the Concordat of 1804---whose import was nevertheless considerably weakened by the so-called Organic Articles, surreptitiously introduced alongside it by Napoleon, which proclaimed a continued State interference in the life of the Church---a real indication of open support for the Ultramontanist campaign had to await the reign of Gregory XVI (1831-1846). His 1832 reprinting and expansion upon a work that he had written in 1795, Il trionfo della Santa Sede e della Chiesa contro gli assalti dei novatori combattuti e respinti colle stesse sue armi, as well as his willingness unilaterally to create national hierarchies in newly independent Latin America countries against the wishes of the King of Spain, signal a reemphasis on papal rights and activity dear to the hearts of all the members of the pro-Roman camp.

Nevertheless, and even though he sometimes accepted setbacks to his program of papal strengthening due to outside governmental pressures, it was Pius IX’s support that really saw the Movement openly and consistently aided from the top on down. Pio Nono encouraged the interventions of Fornari on behalf of the French Ultramontanists, along with the generally more subtle involvement in similar campaigns in the German world of the Apostolic Nuncio in Vienna from 1845-1855, Michele Viale-Prelà (1798-1860). He cheered onwards French bishops, provincial synods, Gueranger, Veuillot, and others in their multiple anti-Gallican campaigns, about which more below. And what could indicate the existence of an Ultramontanist-minded Papacy more than Pius’ restoration of the English (1850) and Dutch (1854) hierarchies, his proclamation, on his sole authority, of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception (1854), many of the statements of the Syllabus of Errors (1864), and, most importantly of all, his backing of both prelates as well as laymen in their efforts to have Papal Infallibility proclaimed at Vatican Council in 1870?

But, once again, just as with previous proponents of their common cause, it was not merely an increase in the authoritative use of papal teaching prerogatives and more regular Roman involvement in local Church governance that the nineteenth century Ultramontanists wanted. Following in the path of St. Maximus the Confessor, the monks of Cluny, and the reformers of the Tridentine Era, what they insisted upon above all else was the Church’s right to proclaim and seek the implementation of the fullness of the Truth. All of the forces identified above believed that it was this primary goal that required the strengthening of the Roman Pontiff, which would work, in turn, to help obtain the liberation of the Church as a whole from political restrictions upon her complete freedom.

The fullness of the Truth that had to be proclaimed was the absolute necessity of understanding the beauty of God’s Creation, its tragic disfigurement through sin, and the subsequent divine offer of an even more exalted perfection to every aspect of nature. That Truth in all its fullness, along with the grace enabling it to become a glorious Way and Life that demanded changes in sinful individual and social behavior---as Moreno came to understand---entered the world as a consequence of the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity in Jesus Christ, the God-Man. The work of Cardinal Pie, the Bishop of Poitiers and the editors of La Civiltà Cattolica, with whom he was very close, is extremely informative with respect to Ultramontantist expression of this manifold theme. ⁷

Try as modern man might, Pie argued at Lourdes in 1876, he could never escape the fact that he lived in a world created and redeemed at the behest of a supernatural will. “The supernatural is finished”, he quoted nineteenth century man as gloating. “Well, look here, then! The supernatural pours out, overflows, sweats from the sand and from the rock, spurts out from the source, and rolls along on the long folds of the living waves of a river of prayers, of chants and of light.”⁸ And as Liberatore said in the pages of the Roman periodical:⁹

God . . . has established one sole order composed of two parts: nature exalted by grace, and grace vivifying nature. He has not confused these two orders, but He has coordinated them. One force alone is the model and one thing alone the motive principle and ultimate end of divine creation: Christ. . . . All the rest is subordinated to Him. The goal of human existence is to form the Mystical Body of this Christ, of this Head of the elect, of this Eternal Priest, of this King of the immortal Kingdom, and the society of those who will eternally glorify Him.

Central to this natural-supernatural interaction was the role of the visible, physical Church as Christ continued in time: the Mystical Body of Christ. Discussion of the Church in this context enabled the Ultramontanists to place the functions of pope, bishop, and priest in a different light than a purely juridical treatment of their responsibilities would allow; to stress their character as “other-Christs” active in the world. Ultramontanists underlined the same theme in explaining every other “fleshly” aspect of the Church’s activity, from the most sacramental to the most mundane. For a correct understanding of the Church as Christ-continued in time, Scriptural and Patristic in inspiration and yet absurd from an Enlightenment minded standpoint, was so illuminating, as Liberatore, along with his fellow editors insisted, that it drastically changed the attitude of those who grasped what it meant. It so transformed one’s appreciation of the Church of God and the tools that she used that “the very carriages of the cardinals would change their appearance in your eyes”. ¹⁰ It is with this background in consideration that Veuillot’s admittedly rather effusive descriptions of the pope as Christ on earth, satirized endlessly by enemies who did not grasp their deeper significance, need to be interpreted. And it was this “incarnational” vision of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ that guided theologians like Pie and, primarily through his influence, Joseph Kleutgen in their preparation of the unsuccessful schema stressing that principle at First Vatican Council.¹¹

Also at the heart of the Ultramontanist argument, and a favorite topic for the editors of the Civiltà, was another Patristic concept, that of individual divinization in Christ. For Liberatore, Taparelli, and a number of their other colleagues, membership in the Church meant real participation in the life of the God-Man, and hence in every conceivable natural perfection emerging from His Sacred Humanity---human freedom and personal perfection thereby being raised to heights unimaginable to any rationalist naturalist.¹²

This exaltation of the capabilities of the individual in and through Christ brought with it a concern for the victory of the anti-Jansenist moral theology of Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787), which recognized the importance of human labor in the path towards divinization. Ultramontanists like Cardinal Gousset, Archbishop of Rheims, in his Justification de la théologie du bienheureux A.M. de Liguori of 1832, and members of the Redemptorist Order everywhere all waged vigorous combat for the triumph of Liguorian thought. Liguori’s triumphant march was accompanied by a revivification and expansion of a variety of devotions providing flesh and blood manifestations of spiritual realities loathed by Jansenist and Enlightened Catholic reformers of the previous era as being blasphemous assaults on the rights of God alone.¹³

At the top of the list, chronologically, was the adoration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, especially promoted by the Jesuits. This devotion brought before the average pious believer the reality of Catholic influence upon the natural order as a whole. Giovanni Perrone explained how not just individuals but society as a whole could be elevated in union with Christ, just as Christ’s human nature, represented by His Heart, was elevated in union with the Word, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. One can follow the recovery of devotion to the Sacred Heart by studying the fortunes of the Apostolate of Prayer, begun in 1844, leafing through the pages of The Sacred Heart Messenger (1861), and ending, in our period, in the ceremony of the consecration of the world to the Sacred Heart in 1875.

Most important existentially was the renewed nineteenth-century interest in the Eucharist as the prime means of uniting natural man with a supernatural God. Eucharistic emphasis led to the call for an earlier introduction to and then much more frequent reception of the Most Blessed Sacrament. La très sainte communion of Gaston de Ségur (1820-1881) was one of the many significant works encouraging these practices, which were also stimulated by an emphasis, especially after 1850, upon the public adoration of the Eucharist. Eucharistic Congresses involving adoration, processions, and theological conferences began in the 1870’s through the work of Gaston de Ségur, the laywoman Marie Tamisier (1834-1910), and many others like them.

A deeper interest in the liturgy inevitably accompanied the revival of concern for reception of and devotion to the Eucharist. Conviction of the powerful role that the liturgy was meant to play in the life of the whole Christian community and in that of each of its individual members was a major theme of Benedictine spirituality, stressed in the work of Dom Guéranger and his Année Liturgique (1841). A liturgical movement grew from its original center in Solesmes (1838) to the associated abbeys of Beuron (1862), in Germany, under Marius Wolter (1825-1890), and Maredsous (1872), in Belgium, with its great liturgist, Gerard van Caloen (1853-1932). It was at Maredsous that the first influential Missel des fidèles was published in 1871, fourteen years after the last papal condemnation of such a translation of the Mass into the vernacular, and twenty-six before such prohibition was quietly dropped in 1897.

Ultramontanists also encouraged a very un-Jansenist devotion to the saints, with special attention given to that to the Virgin. The cults of the Sacred Heart of Mary, of Mary as Mediatrix, of the Miraculous Medal, of Our Lady of La Salette (1846) and of Lourdes (1858), along with the publication of the previously ignored works of Louis Grignion de Montfort (1673-1716), all testify to the importance Marian devotion attained in the course of the century. Meanwhile, the practice of going on pilgrimage to traditional holy places---a special target for abuse on the part of Jansenists and other Catholic “reformers” of the eighteenth century, concerned for avoiding “useless” endeavors---was greatly revived. The 1844 restoration of the pilgrimage to revere what was deemed to be a garment of Christ Himself, the Holy Coat of Trier, attracted hundreds of thousands of participants, popularizing the use of the very modern tool of the railroad to reach the site in question.

A full understanding of the Christian message and its implications necessitated commitment to the value of human Reason as well, and this, in Ultramontantist minds, demanded a revival of the whole scholastic achievement. Scholasticism had been another major target of eighteenth century Jansenist and Enlightenment naturalizing forces within the Catholic world. So successful were their assaults that the teaching of the great scholastic thinkers had been completely prohibited in many Catholic universities and seminaries.

A return to the work of these men, particularly that of St. Thomas Aquinas, began to be advocated in the first half of the century, when scholars like Taparelli d’Azeglio became convinced that only a grounding in a well-organized body of Christian thought would provide the Catholic student with a means accurately to digest and judge the complexity of the modern anti-religious intellect. Similar concerns were to motivate the activists of Mainz, aided in this by their bishop, Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler. Italy and Germany thus became major centers for reviving such studies, with neo-scholastics such as Joseph Kleutgen, author of Die Theologie/Philosophie der Vorzeit Verteidigt,---a man who was motivated also by modern authors, such as Möhler---becoming crucial to the unfolding of First Vatican Council.¹⁴

Christian Truth and the Way that this lay open for men, women, and society, created a new Life for the world, affecting every aspect of existence, politically, socially, and economically. Hence, Ultramontanists were convinced that they possessed a message for the world that could correct, complete, and exalt all of nature and all natural societies and their authorities. Catholic dogma had a supernatural and natural goal that could only be fulfilled if Christ were made the King of Society at large. And given man’s existence as a social being, such authoritative correction, completion, and exaltation were of immense significance to the individual in his work of personal divinization.

An early witness to this conviction can be seen in the Mennaisien Olympe Philippe Gerbet’s book, Considérations sur le dogme générateur de la foi catholique (1829). Later ones appear in the writings of Juan Donoso Cortes (1809-1853) and of the editors of La Civiltà Cattolica, with men like Taparelli inventing the term “Catholic Social Doctrine”, and his colleagues on the Roman journal and Der Katholik in Ketteler’s Mainz pointing the way to the many practical changed needed economically to transform all things in Christ on a practical level.¹⁵ The secularist, Cardinal Pie noted, thought that he was the friend of nature; instead he was actually nature’s most aggressive enemy, and an ignorant one to boot. And Veuillot, in a piece entitled Le canon rayé in 1859 underlined the contrast between the charm of the Empire of Christ with the drab, naturalist “Empire of the World”, dreadfully similar throughout the globe as a whole, being created by a supposedly enlightened and diverse modernity.¹⁶

But why would he change places and climates? There will no longer be any different places or climates, nor any curiosity anywhere. Man will find everywhere the same moderate temperature, the same customs, the same administrative rules, and infallibly the same police taking the same care of him. Everywhere the same language will be spoken, the bayadères will everywhere dance the same ballet. The old diversity would be a memory of the old liberty, an outrage to the new equality, a greater outrage to the bureaux that would be suspected of not being able to establish uniformity everywhere. Their pride will not suffer that. Everything will be done in the image of the main city of the Empire and of the world.

It was the reality of the clash between these two worldviews and the disparity of what comes out of them that gave to Ultramontanists a sense of urgency regarding their mission. The drama involved was well captured by Taparelli in one of his most important articles in the Roman Jesuit journal: O dio re colla libertà, o l’uomo re colla forza. Either God would be King of the universe in a way that protected human freedom as well as social order and peace nurturing it, or man would be sovereign through the imposition of the willful physical power of the strongest in a way that would destroy the liberty and the true well being of all---that of the oppressors included. For it is ultimately a sickness and a weakness affecting everyone and everything that the “spirit of independence” allowing the world to be ruled by sinful disdain of the commands of God assures man and society.¹⁷

Starting with the words “I am free” and their new-found spirit of independence, men began to believe in the infallibility of whatever seemed natural to them, and then to call “nature” everything that is sickness and weakness; to want sickness and weakness to be encouraged instead of healed; to suppose that encouraging weakness makes men healthier and happy; to conclude, finally, that human nature {conceived of as sickness and weakness} possesses the means to render man and society blissful on earth, and this without faith, grace, authority, or supernatural community…since “nature” gives us the feeling that it must be so.

All of the arguments outlined above translated into manifold calls for change inside the Church, the State, and society at large. Lay and clerical activism was especially important in France and Gemany, where earlier battles against interpretations of Canon Law that were Gallican or Febronian in spirit were still more intensified after 1848. We have already seen how much the question of the right to private schooling particularly affected France, which also witnessed passionate Ultramontanist combat for adoption of the Roman Liturgy in place of local rites that were said to have been poisoned by Jansenist prayers and practices that were evident in popular catechisms and devotional works as well. Italian activists engaged battle with the State over everything from education to unjust Risorgimento warfare, with Social Justice struggles more and more attracting their attention alongside that of their German comrades. This often brought activists into conflict with Ordinaries attached to the Canon Law interpretations, liturgies, catechisms, and devotional works in question, leading to Ultramontanist appeals for help from Pius IX, which became much more open and definitive with the encyclical letter Inter Multiplices of March 21^st, 1853. Militants felt perhaps even more disdain for bishops who were deemed to be primarily political servants of local and national governments, their subservience demonstrating the need for papal intervention of a more vigorous sort in an even more vivid manner.¹⁸

Like Maximus the Confessor, the monks of Cluny, and the Tridentine reformers before them, nineteenth century believers, their consciousness raised by the troubles of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (1789-1815), were very much aware of the nefarious role that States had played in prohibiting Catholics to learn, speak, and act as they must---most tragically, those States that actually claimed to be Defenders of the Faith. Ultramontanists like Lamennais and his eager band of disciples, who had placed such fervent hopes in the help of the traditional Bourbon Monarchy of the French Restoration (1814-1830) as the force most apt to work together with the Church as a battery charging Christian society and Christian man, gradually became convinced that this had either little interest in or ability to do what was necessary to electrify Catholic civilization.

We will return to Lamennais’ unacceptable response to this disillusionment below, in the context of illustrating problems affecting the Ultramontanist Movement as a whole. However, we must first note that those followers who broke with their master dealt with their disappointment by arguing that the traditional dilemma of Church State relations might best be resolved by seeking protection for religion democratically, through the political and social action of the mass of the Catholic laity putting pressure upon their governments. As a mass democratic force, the laity was neither an integral part of the government, nor directly moved by the more suspicious personal aims of its secular rulers. And as the laity, by definition, had different practical concerns than the clergy, it could not be said to be a purely self-interested clerical force. Action by mobilized lay pressure groups would thereby keep the clergy’s hands clean of everything but the dogmatic and spiritual guidance that its charism justly involved, allowing it to exercise its proper influence by instructing ordinary believers who became the direct agents of Catholic Action. The call to arms of the laity was a nineteenth century mobilization, and Ultramontanists were very much prominent among the recruiting sergeants. Moreover, they permitted the aroused laity a very wide scope for tactical experimentation in pursuit of the victory of the cause of Christ the King.¹⁹

It would be foolish to ignore the flaws of the nineteenth century Ultramontanist Movement. There were internal battles for control of its intellectual direction, with, for example, the supporters of Scholasticism often overwhelming and even trying to silence entirely those espousing more scriptural, patristic, historical, and literary defenses of the Faith. Pious proponents of personal devotional practices could look askance at others who were more communal minded in their piety. Prelates equally as dedicated as members of their flock to the cause of Christ the King could often feel their episcopal authority under assault by the changing and experimental tactics of democratic, lay, Catholic political activists aided by representatives of the lower clergy and newspapers propagandizing their projects for State and society. Bishops complained that this insubordination was actually reviving that unhealthy spirit of eighteenth century Jansenist laicism against which the Movement had up until now opposed. Chastized militants then questioned whether more cautious bishops were perhaps falling back into a Gallican like subservience to the established secular order.²⁰

Interestingly enough, a recognition of the danger of such attitudes can be discovered in the writings of some of the Movement’s most prominent members. The passionately scholastic-friendly editors of La Civiltà Cattolica, along with Fr. Kleutgen, demonstrated an awareness of the importance of the Fathers, mystical theology, and history in general. And Ultramontantist theologians of the caliber of Cardinal Pie and Cardinal Victor Dechamps (1810-1883) of Malines were among the most harsh judges of exaggerations in the arguments of the supporters of Papal Infallibility, especially those that revealed a disregard of the legitimate apostolic authority of ordinary bishops.²¹

As far as I am concerned, the most dangerous of the flaws of a fair number of the proponents of the Ultramontanist Movement---particularly in France, but noticeable almost everywhere elsewhere as well---was a harshness of spirit and tone, accompanied by a stubborn conviction of the absolute necessity and goodness of each and every aspect of their approach dispensing them from all possible consideration of their own mistakes and exaggerations. This flaw was to contribute mightily to our own calamitous ecclesiastical situation today. To understand that dreadful flaw and its consequences properly we must once again turn back to the tale of Lamennais, at whose feet we shall lay the responsibility for it.

Deeply disillusioned by the failure of the Legitimist political authorities, Lamennais was perhaps still more horrified to learn that the Catholic bishops would not correct them, and most troubled of all when the Papacy failed to support his principle of total separation of Church and State as the sole pathway out of this nightmare. Gregory XVI (1831-1846) condemned that escape route in his encyclical letter Mirari vos (August 15, 1832). Lamennais himself was personally chastised when he expanded upon his vision in still more disturbing ways, in another encyclical, Singulari nos (June 21, 1834).

For Lamennais, papal condemnation of his central principle meant that the only hope for the victory of the fullness of the Catholic vision lay in placing one’s faith in the infallible teaching authority of the mass of the Catholic Peoples of the world themselves, and, by extension, in promoting the cause of democratic government to give it clout. On the one hand, faith in the People’s unfailing commitment to Catholic Truth was, ironically, at least partially due to one of the major counterrevolutionary arguments of his day, most closely connected with the writings of the Marquis Louis de Bonald (1754-1840).

This argument looked not to speculative theology and Reason as guides to the Truth---at least the Truth insofar as it related to social order---but to the teaching that came from the traditions imbedded in the life of a given people and handed down by them from generation to generation. Such “traditionalism” helped to drive home the (accurate) blame for revolutionary developments on the work of a small rationalist elite with no sense of or concern for what the People actually believed and desired. Still, on the other hand, Lamennais’ insistence upon the fact that this rooting of the Truth in the traditions of the Catholic Peoples at large would be accompanied by a demonstration of their “vital energy” resulting in their dynamic activity on its behalf, evoked a Romantic emphasis on the importance of “deep feeling” as a sign of God’s presence. And this was to lead him down Jean Jacques Rousseau’s pathway to a sense of his personal role as Prophet-Precursor of the Truth.

For, alas, the Catholic Peoples, in fact, lacked the requisite vital energy to accept, live, and thereby implement Lamennais’ activist program! If they remained unconscious, then the infallible message imbedded in them had to be “awakened” through the efforts of an enlightened Prophet. Lamennais was that Prophet. He was obliged himself to speak for the "dumb" Catholic Peoples and work to raise their consciousness from their unnatural torpor to fulfillment of their God-given mission. In the process, he must destroy anything and anyone that might stand in the way of their maturation---the existing Catholic Faith and the Catholic Hierarchy at the head of the list. Hence, his openness to Giuseppe Mazzini's (1809-1872) call to leadership of a regenerated, God-loving priesthood; a vanguard that would establish the new heaven and the new earth; a "Church of Precursors which I should like to see you found while waiting for the People to rise".²²

One consequence of this development was that Lamennais’ “separation” of Church and State ends, in practice, in their fusion together more firmly than ever before in history. Ultimate authority in both institutions lies in exactly the same hands: those of "the People's Prophet". Lamennais understands the People's true character and desires, transmitted to them by God Almighty. He must do everything in his powers to arouse them to an awareness of the Divine Truth and Mission he knows they unconsciously long to grasp. He does not have to worry about clashes between an independent Church and State on matters where their jurisdiction over creatures of body and soul intersect, because a collision, in his system, cannot possibly take place. It is only the energetic passion and vital will of the Prophet that rule in the land shaped by the new Christianity that the People---the voice of God---supposedly are meant to propagate.

A sense of prophetic infallibility and entitlement motivated those who in one way or another shared Lamennais’ call for separation of Church and State, recognition of the People as the source of a God-given Truth uniting all things spiritual and secular under its infallible rule, and the need for anyone in touch with “vital” contemporary forces to speak for the Masses should these, in practice, slumber. Such allies bemoaned the existing Church’s failure to connect with the “energetic”, modern, secular world that the Ultramontanists after Lamennais condemned as destructive.

In France, this entailed an alliance between old style Gallicans and now anti-Ultramontanist Mennaisiens that would have been deemed inconceivable earlier. Bishops of Gallican tendency generally supported French governmental policies, whatever they might be. Thus, when the Second Empire entered the lists against militant, anti-modernist Ultramontanism, they were gradually able to make common cause with Mennaisiens like the Liberal Catholic, Charles de Montalembert (1810-1870), who found himself to be more and more at odds with the mainstream Ultramontanist Movement’s positing of a chasm between the world where “Christ is King” and that shaped by the modern mentality. Bishop-academicians such as Louis Maret (1805-1884), always intellectually close with this alternative Mennaisien camp, were quite eager openly to oppose Ultramontanist attempts to free the Church and Catholics from submission to the civil law. Once again, they then supported their position with the same sense of willful, infallible, prophetic arrogance that stimulated Lamennais as well.²³ No theological or rational criticism of their judgment was permitted.

Influential as it was, and powerfully backed by Enlightenment, Jansenist, nationalist, and bureaucratic forces throughout Europe, this strange alliance then created a tall tale about the Ultramontanist Movement that we have been discussing. It embedded this tale in an overall modernist vision of life that prophesied an evolving Church and State ultimately to be defined by whatever it was that it itself arbitrarily desired. Dominant in academic circles eager to defend the “modern” worldview as well, it willfully distorted the historical record regarding the nature and the character of its own stand and that of its opponents, and continues to do so today.

The result is that very few people have any idea of the positive accomplishments of the Ultramontanist Movement as we have presented it. They know little or nothing about its concern for the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ and of individual divinization, concepts partly inspired by nineteenth century thinkers such as Möhler, whom proponents of the New Theology of the 1930’s and 1940’s claimed falsely to be rediscovering for the first time. They know little or nothing of the Ultramontanists’ sustained fight for Catholic universalism against arrogant, condescending, secularist, modernist nationalists. They cannot find any record of the Ultramontanist battle versus proto-Nazi progressive pronouncements that would make most twenty-first century Liberal Catholics shudder. They are, in short, blind to the struggle of the Ultramontanists against the evils of modernity: their fight for human freedom and dignity against arbitrary, tyrannical willfulness, as reflected in Taparelli’s contrast: O Dio Re colla libertà; o l’Uomo Re colla forza.

Unfortunately, it was precisely this same spirit of entitlement, replacing substantive theological and rational argument with arrogant, arbitrary commands to submit to what the Prophet knows to be the Truth that also manifested itself in the expressions of some of the representatives of the Ultramontanist Movement that we have generally been praising in this article. Most importantly, it entered into their fervent call for definition of the doctrine of Papal Infallibility and a distorted but highly popular explanation of what that definition, when accomplished, actually meant.

First Vatican Council bequeathed to the Catholic world a perfectly sound definition of the nature of the papal teaching authority and other papal prerogatives, brilliantly explicated by contemporary Ultramontanists like Pie and Dechamps. Nevertheless, due to many circumstances, it bequeathed us this definition without defining the “constitution” of the Mystical Body as a whole---something that the schema prepared by theologians like Kleutgen, and improved upon by others such as Cardinal Pie, had indeed sought to do. It therefore left many ecclesiastical questions “hanging in mid air”.

Among other things, First Vatican Council left behind it a great confusion about how Infallibility applied to the use of the so-called Ordinary Magisterium of the Papacy, feeding a constant debate over whether or not this actually had been invoked in specific matters of great importance. Many Ultramontanists jumped into the breech, unjustifiably promoting a terribly exaggerated teaching on Papal Infallibility that was definitely not the one adopted by the Council as though it were the one that “real Catholics”, in practice, were obliged to accept anyway. And this has been utilized to divinize every statement and action of the Papacy as the expression of Divine Will, incapable of being subject to any theological or rational criticism. An atmosphere was created in which even all of those papal statements and actions which have worked to dismantle the Church of God over the past fifty years, ending in the construction of the prophetic New Church of Pachamama with its prophetic, LGBTQ+ and World Economic Forum Magisterium, are considered to be straight from the mouth of God. A pope in Lamennais’ image and defended with Lamennais’ ideas is free to do anything that he wishes. He is a Prophet whose Church can be the antithesis of the one that all of Tradition recognizes to be the real Mystical Body of Christ. ²⁴

Although this paper concerns the influences of the nineteenth century Ultramontanist Movement upon Garcia Moreno and not the actual work of the President of Ecuador itself, we cannot end our discussion without noting once again that the men and ideas that we have been probing above did indeed have an enormous impact upon him and his labor, either directly or indirectly. The contemporary leaders of the Ultramontanist Movement themselves knew this to be true, and they celebrated their disciple’s achievements and the tragic glory of his assassination in consequence. He was one with them in their love for the Mystical Body and their desire to see Christ as King. He was one with them in their devotion to the Sacred Heart. He was one with them in his conviction that having Christ as King would allow for the perfection of modern scientific and technological advances in Ecuador, since they would then be nurtured within the proper hierarchy of values, corrected of their flaws, and raised to the service of the greater glory of God. He was one with them in validating the rights of the Catholic laity and the validity of democratic political pressure, even though this meant clashing with native clergy and prelates in his country whom he considered to be either ignorant or indifferent. Yes, he was also one with many of them in being filled with that sense of prophetic mission that could sometimes blind the Ultramontantists to their own flaws, causing them---and him---to act in ways that even their friends could criticize as arbitrary and heavy-handed. Finally, Garcia Moreno was also one with them in their sense of urgency, aware as he was, that the “progressives” he was fighting were nothing more than a willful, self-interested, hypocritical oligarchy posing as the friends of the People; a People with a sacred, supernatural destiny worthy of far more than the drab and dreadfully tyrannical Empire of the World that they were actually creating.²⁵ And this, to my way of thinking, wipes out any of the “sins” connected with the Ultramontanist approach.

Viva Cristo Rey!

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