Ultramontanism

Ultramontanism is a current within Roman Catholicism that emphasizes the authority of the pope and the centralization of the Church in Rome. The name comes from the Latin for "beyond the mountains": it originally described Catholics north of the Alps who looked past them to Rome for leadership. As a political outlook it took shape in the nineteenth century, when supporters argued that a strong, centralized papacy was the best defense of the Church against revolutionary governments, liberal states and national rulers who wanted to control their local churches. It was opposed by Gallicanism in France and similar movements elsewhere that sought to limit papal power.

The debate over papal power is old, but modern ultramontanism grew as a reaction against Gallicanism, which the French clergy set out in the Four Articles of 1682, and against the state control of the Church known in Austria as Josephinism. After the French Revolution, the Savoyard writer Joseph de Maistre argued in Du Pape (1819) that papal sovereignty was the foundation of social order. The French priest Félicité de Lamennais championed papal authority in his early career before breaking with Rome. The journalist Louis Veuillot, editor of L'Univers, became the movement's most forceful popular voice. Under Pope Pius IX the movement reached its height. The Syllabus of Errors (1864) condemned many liberal propositions, and the First Vatican Council (1869 to 1870) defined papal infallibility and the pope's universal jurisdiction in the constitution Pastor Aeternus. A minority who rejected the decrees formed the Old Catholic churches, and in Germany the Kulturkampf under Otto von Bismarck targeted Catholic institutions in the 1870s.

French ultramontanism, led by Veuillot, was the most combative and closely tied to opposition to the secular Republic. In England, Cardinal Henry Edward Manning was a leading ultramontane at the Vatican Council. In Quebec, ultramontane bishops promoted a strong role for the Church in schools and public life. Some ultramontanes were political conservatives and monarchists, while others saw papal authority as a way to free the Church from all governments.

Liberal Catholics of the period, such as Lord Acton and the theologian Ignaz von Döllinger, argued that the movement exaggerated papal power and ignored the historical role of councils and bishops. Liberals and secular critics saw it as hostile to freedom of conscience, the press and democratic government. Nationalists accused ultramontanes of divided loyalty. Later Catholic theologians argued that the Second Vatican Council (1962 to 1965), with its emphasis on the shared authority of bishops, restored a balance that ultramontanism had upset.

Ultramontanism shaped the modern Catholic Church: authority became more centralized in Rome, Roman liturgy and teaching spread more uniformly, and papal teaching gained a larger role in everyday Catholic life. Politically, it fed conflicts between the Church and liberal or secular states in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere in the late nineteenth century.