The True Story Of The Vatican Council

This spirit of war taunted Pius IX in calling a Council. It is with this devistating spirit that the Church seemed to tread with caution. [box] On the 11th of December 1866, the French flag was lowered on the castle of St. Angelo. Three days before, the French general in command had taken his leave of Pius the Ninth. In reply to his words of farewell, the Pope answered, "We must not deceive ourselves; the revolution will come here. "[/box] Revolution was in the air. It was in the hearts of men. This revolution was a turning point of men straying away from the laws of God. Yet, however, Pius IX called for the council anyways. As Cardinal Manning writes: "It may therefore be said that the second period of the Christian world has closed. Of thirty-six crowned heads ten are still Catholic, two are of the Greek separation, twenty-four are nominally Protestant. The people of many and great nations are faithful and fervent children of the Catholic Church, but the Revolution either openly or secretly, in its substance or in its spirit, is behind every throne and in almost every government and legislature of the Christian world. The public laws even of the nations in which the people are Catholics are Catholic no longer. The unity of the nations in faith and worship, as the Apostles founded it, seems now to be dissolved. The unity of the Church is more compact and solid than ever, but the Christendom of Christian kingdoms is of the past. We have entered into a third period. The Church began not with kings, but with the peoples of the world, and to the peoples, it may be, the Church will once more return. The princes and governments and legislatures of the world were everywhere against it at its outset: they are so again. But the hostility of the nineteenth century is keener than the hostility of the first. Then the world had never believed in Christianity; now it is falling from it. But the Church is the same, and can renew its relations with whatsoever forms of civil life the world is pleased to fashion for itself. If, as political foresight has predicted, all nations are on their way to democracy, the Church will know how to meet this new and strange aspect of the world. The high policy of wisdom by which the Pontiffs held together the dynasties of the Middle Age will know how to hold together the peoples who still believe. Such was the world on which Pius the Ninth was looking out when he conceived the thought of an Ecumenical Council. He saw the world which was once all Catholic tossed and harassed by the revolt of its intellect against the revelation of God, and of its will against His law; by the revolt of civil society against the sovereignty of God; and by the antichristian spirit which is driving on princes and governments towards anti-christian revolutions. He to whom, in the words of St. John Chrysostom, the whole world was committed, saw in the Council of the Vatican the only adequate remedy for the world-wide evils of the nineteenth century. It will be remembered that the Consultors, in giving their opinion that the holding of a Council was expedient, gave no opinion as to the time when it could safely be convoked. The threatening aspect of the times was enough to make them hesitate."