by Hubert Wolf
The new scholastic and Ultramontanist camp saw this as an attack on them. They wrote an opposing statement, and denounced Döllinger’s speech and the entire conference to Rome. And Rome, unfortunately for Döllinger, was home to his old archenemy, who had spent years waiting for a chance to have his revenge: Cardinal Reisach. Reisach believed that in 1855 the Munich theologian had used his influence on the Bavarian government to get Reisach “promoted” away from Munich. The denunciation of Döllinger offered Reisach the opportunity to take revenge on an academic he believed was blinded by his pride in his own intellect. He now had the pope on his side. And, once again, he enlisted Kleutgen in his mission—hence Reisach’s visit to Galloro.
The real incendiary power of Kleutgen’s idea was revealed in the Tuas libenter brief, which said that in Germany there was a widespread “false opinion against the old school.” It also referred to the “false” philosophy practiced in connection with this.99 The term “old school” was at least an indirect allusion to the first volume of Kleutgen’s Theologie der Vorzeid, which had been published in Münster in 1853. But the reference to “false” philosophy may have been directed at Jakob Frohschammer,100 who was teaching in Munich at that time, and had been placed on the Index for philosophical errors a few years previously, at Kleutgen’s urging. He was one of new scholasticism’s most steadfast opponents in Germany, and was also an enemy of the Jesuits. It was no coincidence that Tuas libenter was addressed to the archbishop of Munich, Gregor von Scherr.101 He was not only responsible for the area in which the Munich conference had taken place, but also for Frohschammer, who taught there. Kleutgen at least inspired this brief, if he didn’t write it. In any case, the newly accessible sources in the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith allow us to identify him as the real “inventor” of the ordinary magisterium of the pope and Curia.
Jakob Frohschammer’s work Ueber den Ursprung der menschlichen Seelen (On the Origin of Human Souls) was denounced to the Congregation of the Index in 1855.102 Thomas Aquinas famously taught that the human embryo was progressively imbued with a soul: it gained first a plant and then an animal soul, and a human soul developed after this. The question discussed among theologians was whether this progression should be thought of in creationist or generationist terms—whether God had to perform an act of creation for each of the three successive souls, or whether the succession proceeded automatically as the fetus developed, from the initial spark it received from its parents in the act of conception. Frohschammer argued in favor of the generationist position.
The secretary of the Congregation of the Index looked over the matter, and initiated a trial. The votum was entrusted to none other than Joseph Kleutgen. He clearly thought the Munich philosopher’s work on generationism was an open-and-shut case, as his report showed: it was barely eight pages long. But the question of generationism versus creationism was far from the focus of Kleutgen’s interest. For him, this was more about the fundamental question of what counted as binding doctrine, and what didn’t. Creationism had never been defined by the Church as an article of faith, which was why Frohschammer assumed that he was permitted to argue for an alternative model. Kleutgen opposed this view, saying that since the seventh century at the latest, it had been the unanimous doctrine of the pope, bishops, and good theologians that generationism was “close to heresy.” At the very least, it had been viewed “as erroneous and highly audacious.” It was this seemingly uninterrupted consensus within the Church that meant Frohschammer’s work had to be judged heretical.103
But Kleutgen’s argumentation convinced neither the consultors nor the cardinals.104 There was therefore a second trial, for which two more censors were engaged: the Franciscan Friar Minor Conventual Angelo Trullet,105 and the Benedictine Bernard Smith.106 Kleutgen was forced to position himself. He now returned to the idea of a double magisterium, which he had developed in his Theologie der Vorzeid. It was something he had first considered in a dispute with the moral and pastoral theologian Johann Baptist Hirscher.107 Kleutgen’s second votem on Frohschammer essentially just explained the argument he had already advanced in his book.
It would be a misunderstanding and an extraordinary presumption, Kleutgen said, to claim that the Church only considered something binding when it acted as the highest judge in a religious dispute, exercising its power as sacred teaching authority. Rather, the Church believed that everything it presented in its role as ordinary teaching authority was binding. It thus had a “double magisterium.” Unlike Thomas Aquinas, however, Kleutgen wasn’t referring to one magisterium of shepherds, and one of the theologians. For him, both teaching authorities, sacred and ordinary, belonged exclusively to the shepherds, and ultimately to the pope. “The … ordinary and perpetual … consists of that very enduring Apostolate of the Church. The other is extraordinary, and exercised only at particular times, for example when false teachers cause unrest within the Church. It is at once a teaching authority and a judging authority.”108
For Kleutgen, this also settled the question of whether somebody true to the Catholic faith was allowed to form his own views in areas “where one cannot prove through the agreement of theologians, or in any other way,” that something “belongs to the doctrine of the Catholic Church in the strictest sense.” According to Kleutgen, the Church certainly didn’t recognize “the freedom exercised by certain people, to teach anything that is not technically classed as heretical.” In his Theology of Times Past, Kleutgen had proposed to Hirscher that freedom of thought and teaching wasn’t just limited by the dogma, but by the ordinary magisterium. He now repeated this in his votum on Frohschammer. There could be no “intemperance of opinion and teaching in the Church” regarding tenets that hadn’t been explicitly defined as dogma by the sacred magisterium. Creationism might not have been formally defined, but it had been consistently espoused by the ordinary and enduring magisterium. According to Kleutgen, this authority belonged first to the pope, in everything he said, and then to the bishops, who were scattered across the globe and taught with one accord. It also belonged to the Roman Congregations, and, finally, “respected” theologians.
Interestingly, the second evaluator, Angelo Trullet, accused Kleutgen of introducing entirely new criteria and benchmarks for evaluating theology and censoring books. This was an attempt to pass a law criminalizing something that previously hadn’t been a crime at all.109 Trullet refused to recognize an ordinary magisterium. In his eyes, therefore, this couldn’t be a reason to condemn Frohschammer. Trullet said that creationism hadn’t been formally defined, so of course theologians were permitted to argue for generationism.
But the Congregation of the Index didn’t accept this. The third censor, Bernard Smith, came down on Kleutgen’s side and agreed with the idea of the ordinary magisterium. Frohschammer’s generationist text was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in March 1857 for contradicting the ordinary magisterium Kleutgen had developed, which, before that point, nobody had heard of.
Having been indexed and humiliated in other ways by the Church authorities, Frohschammer wrote two programmatic texts that completely rethought the relationship between reason and faith, science and Church authority. They were also heavily critical of the Congregation of the Index.110 These books were duly denounced in Rome and investigated by the Congregation of the Index. But once again, Frohschammer hadn’t denied any officially defined doctrine. The consultor Piotr Semenenko’s111 votum therefore concluded that Frohschammer’s theology might be unusual, but it was completely orthodox.112 When the Congregation of the Index definitively refused to ban these works, too, Kleutgen resorted to a process already tested in the Günther trial. Via Reisach, he managed to bypass the Congregation of the Index, and got the pope himself to condemn Frohschammer’s teachings in the brief Gravissimas inter (December 11, 1862). Kleutgen may have written an early draft of this brief in Galloro.113
Kleutgen’s conviction in the Sant’Ambrogio trial didn’t impact his influence on Church politic
s, or the implementation of his theology. Even while he was serving his sentence in Galloro, his concept of the ordinary magisterium found its way into Pius IX’s doctrinal documents. But how was Kleutgen affected on a personal level? Did being convicted of heresy really leave him cold?
Kleutgen was discomfited by the fact that the highest religious tribunal had condemned him as a heretic. He was, after all, an obsessively correct theologian who thought of himself as hyper-orthodox. His entire life had been dedicated to obeying the pope in all things. As an influential consultor for the Congregation of the Index, he was usually the one classing other people as heretics, bringing theological and personal destruction down upon them. The judgment was a brutal blow, to which he was unable to reconcile himself. He was in danger of falling from the rock to which he had clung in fear through the storms of the nineteenth century, and being plunged back into the roaring waves. The Holy Father, whom he feared and idolized at the same time, and whom he had only ever tried to please, had chastised him and branded him a disobedient son. Ultimately, Kleutgen had “not been able to bear this reprimand.” From then on, he was a “broken man.”114
The Jesuit must have found it difficult to accept that he had failed to live up to his own moral and theological standards.115 He wanted to be an exemplary and strictly moral priest, but he had succumbed to the temptations of a woman several times over. He knew the criteria for judging the authenticity of revelations, but had still taken the “divine” letters at face value in spite of their absurd contents. He knew French kissing was immoral, but had still put his tongue into the mouth of a young nun for minutes at a time. He was at home in the exalted heights of theological speculation, following in the footsteps of Saint Thomas Aquinas—but he wasn’t equal to the human, all-too-human lowlands of pastoral care in a convent.
And the site of this disaster had not been somewhere in the provinces, but the center of Christianity, the pope’s own city. The longer Kleutgen stayed in Rome, the more he associated it with his unhappiness and “nameless suffering.”116 More than once, he complained “about the hated city of Rome, the site of my great fall.” By the summer of 1869, he was convinced he had to turn his back on the Eternal City once and for all. He believed he could no longer be of “any particular use” there. “It seems better for me and the community,” he wrote, “if I live out my days in greater seclusion, in some house of my order.”117
With permission from the general of his order, he retired to Viterbo—but he soon returned to Rome to play a decisive role in the First Vatican Council. As a simple priest, he couldn’t become a Council Father or a member of any of the conciliary commissions. Only cardinals, bishops, and the heads of monastic communities could perform these roles. Kleutgen served as council theologian to one of his fellow Jesuits, the apostolic vicar of Calcutta, Archbishop Walter Steins.118 Steins was a member of the dogmatic commission, which considered potential constitutions and definitions to be issued by the Council. In this role, Kleutgen helped to shape the Council’s two dogmatic constitutions on the Catholic Faith and the Church of Christ, and the dogma of papal infallibility. Without the First Vatican Council, his concept of the ordinary magisterium could never have gained so much weight, nor had such an effect on history.
The pope intended this Council as an opportunity for the Church to position itself against the hostile modern world and its rationalism. Its most important task was to clarify the relationship between faith and reason, and to rebuff what Catholics in Rome viewed as the erroneous ideas of many German- and French-speaking theologians. These fundamental theological problems were discussed extensively in the draft De doctrina catholica. However, this draft was far too verbose for most of the Council Fathers, and they rejected it. On the wishes of Pius IX, Joseph Kleutgen was tasked with revising it, as part of the constitution on the Faith. He was then largely responsible for the wording of the final text.119
It was only to be expected that Kleutgen’s concept of the double magisterium would surface again, in the revelatory constitution Dei filius, which was adopted on April 24, 1870. “Further, by divine and Catholic faith, all those things must be believed which are contained in the written word of God and in tradition, and those which are proposed by the Church, either in a solemn pronouncement or in her ordinary and universal teaching power, to be believed as divinely revealed.”120
Kleutgen also had a crucial influence on the constitution Pastor aeternus of July 18, 1870, in which the dogma of papal infallibility and papal primacy were defined. He drafted the wording for the definition of infallibility, which met with “the highest acclaim from the fathers.” The man who later became prefect of the Congregation of the Index, Cardinal Andreas Steinhuber,121 was also convinced that the final text of the dogma was shaped by Kleutgen: “A goodly number of the principles defined were formulated by him.”122
The wording Kleutgen suggested was: “Therefore all that is taken or taught to be beyond doubt in matters of faith and virtue everywhere in the world, under the leadership of the bishops bound to the Apostolic Throne, and what the bishops define should be believed and taught by all, with the agreement of the pope or by the pope himself, when he speaks ex cathedra, must be taken as infallible.”123 It is debatable whether Kleutgen, as some people have claimed, really bore “the main responsibility for the detailed preparation of the constitution Pastor aeternus.”124 This would mean that the final wording of the new dogma was directly attributable to him. But what we do know is that Kleutgen was a man who had been convicted of formal heresy, and was now exerting an active influence on the conception of the infallibility dogma.
Kleutgen wasn’t able to remain in Rome for long: Italian troops occupied the pope’s city in the summer of 1870, bringing the First Vatican Council to an abrupt end. The Council was postponed indefinitely, and Kleutgen was forced to flee to Viterbo. Still, he claimed: “Despite the suspension of the Council, I shall work on the Schema de Ecclesia, though this is to be kept secret.”125 Kleutgen set off on an odyssey through northern Italy and South Tyrol. He was in poor health, feeling physically and spiritually exhausted. He went first to Brixen, though the climate there was “too extreme for me, as I am in any case much weakened and extremely susceptible.”126 He felt rootless, in need of a sanctuary. He longed for the Germanicum in Rome, and at the same time hated the city because it reminded him of the disaster of Sant’Ambrogio. Kleutgen kept moving, staying in Görz, Bad Innichen, Lengmoos near Bozen, Trento.…127 He had become a drifter, unable to find peace anywhere. When one day he arrived at the pastor’s house in Lengmoos he looked like a homeless person, “all ragged from head to foot, from hat to shoes,” even though he was really “an orderly man” as the pastor there remembered.128
After eight long years, the summer of 1878 brought a turning point: Kleutgen was finally allowed to return to his beloved Germanicum. His delight in being made prefect of studies, and reinstated as a consultor to the Congregation of the Index, was ultimately greater than his fear of Rome.129 Time seems to have healed the rift of 1862, at least to some degree. Leo XIII, the new pope, also issued the encyclical Aeterni Patris on August 4, 1879.130 This document declared the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, and with it the new scholasticism that Kleutgen had always advocated, to be the only legitimate philosophy of the Catholic Church. Whether Kleutgen was directly involved in composing the encyclical or not, this was official approbation of his life’s work from the Church’s teaching authority.131 Theologically, he had achieved his aim.
It had been a long road to the recognition of new scholasticism as the only legitimate Catholic theology. Kleutgen had faced heavy opposition, even from within the Jesuit order—in particular from Carlo Passaglia. Kleutgen had not shrunk from inspiring Maria Luisa to produce the letter from the Virgin Mary denouncing Passaglia, his main theological opponent in the Society, as a homosexual, and thereby silencing him. First, new scholasticism became the Jesuit theology, and then Leo XIII finally made it the theology of the Catholic world.
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nbsp; But Kleutgen’s happiness in Rome did not last. The city that had seen his greatest personal humiliation was also witness to his ultimate doom. While giving a lecture in March 1879, he suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed down one side. Having been “defeated”—as he wrote—“I will sadly have nothing more to do with the Gregorian University.”132 On the other hand, he claimed he was quite glad to be leaving Rome—that “den of robbers.”133 He began another odyssey: Castel Gandolfo; Terlago near Trento; Mantua; Venice; Chieri; and finally, in July 1881, Saint Anton near Kaltern, in South Tyrol. Kleutgen felt obsessively compelled to continue writing theological works in spite of his disability, but the paralysis made it very difficult. After the summer of 1881, he was “almost completely unable to write.”134 His hands refused to obey him. Over New Year 1882–1883, he suffered another stroke, which robbed him of his speech.
Joseph Wilhelm Carl Kleutgen died on the evening of January 13, 1883, and was buried on January 15 in the graveyard in Kaltern.135 His gravestone proclaimed he was a “man of outstanding gifts, respected scholarship, distinguished by moral integrity and famed in the academy for his many published works.”136