Pius IX summoned all the general superiors of religious orders and congregations to participate in the First Vatican Council. At the time, many said that the pope did this to ensure the participation of Dom Prosper Guéranger, Abbot of Solesmes, and Superior of the Benedictine Congregation of France. Nothing could have been more natural than for this rumor to circulate. This son of Saint Benedict was one of the glories of the Church. Given his illustrious reputation, no one would understand if he did not attend the Council.
Dom Guéranger began his apostolate among the elite Catholics who accompanied Father Félicité de Lamennais in the campaign against Gallicanism during the Restoration of 1830. He separated from Lamennais when Lamennais abandoned Ultramontane principles, embarking on the liberal adventure that led him to apostasy. Dom Guéranger was the restorer of the Benedictine Order in France. He also promoted the revival of Benedictine science, which had rendered so many services in the past. Under Dom Guéranger, this academic tradition regained its former prominence and brilliance.
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These accomplishments, in and of themselves, would have been enough to fill a life exclusively dedicated to serving the Church. Nonetheless, the illustrious Abbot of Solesmes also promoted the movement to adopt the Roman liturgy. Over twenty years, overcoming fierce and stubborn resistance, he succeeded in bringing the French dioceses into liturgical unity.
All the great ecclesiastical questions of the nineteenth century found Dom Guéranger to be a bulwark of orthodoxy. When Catholic principles were at stake, he did not hesitate to sacrifice even the dearest friendships. He even abandoned the Count de Montalembert, a protector of the Abbey of Solesmes, when the Count embraced liberalism. An active Ultramontane, Dom Guéranger’s wisdom helped all those who fought for the Church. He was a relentless and feared opponent of liberal Catholics.
Shaken by the illness that would soon take his life, Dom Guéranger could not heed Pius IX’s call. However, while unable to participate in the Council, he continued his tireless fight for papal infallibility. Indeed, he was one of its great defenders.
The Abbot of Solesmes chose Bishop Maret’s anti-infallibilist book, Du concile général et de la paix religieuse (Of the General Council and Religious Peace) as his target. Dom Guéranger entered the controversy, agitating Catholic France. The Gallican chief’s arguments were so weak that the pious Benedictine wrote a complete refutation of the Bishop of Sura’s two volumes in a few weeks. He titled it De la monarchie pontificale à propôs du livre de Mgr. De Sura (On Papal Monarchy, Concerning Most Rev. De Sura’s Book).
Dom Guéranger’s book is divided into two parts. In the first, he refuted Bishop Maret’s Gallican prejudices. He also took on articles by Father Ignaz von Döllinger, as well as the liberal Catholics’ objections about the ‘untimeliness’ of papal infallibility. He especially condemned Montalembert’s manifesto in the Correspondant and Bishop Felix Dupanloup’s letter attacking Louis Veuillot. In the second part, he expounds on the theological foundations of infallibility and the full timeliness of the Council’s proclamation of the dogma.
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Bishop Guéranger’s work had significant repercussions. The Ultramontanes naturally welcomed it with jubilation. The first edition soon sold out, and the second was published with a brief by Pius IX approving and praising the book and its author.
The publication of De la monarchie pontificale was one of the high points of the struggle over infallibility. At the same time, one cannot deny that Dom Guéranger’s debate with Father Auguste Joseph Alphonse Gratry was one of the most famous events preceding the Council.
Father Gratry was Bishop Dupanloup’s Vicar-General in the Diocese of Orléans. He was also an oratorian who distinguished himself in 19th-century French literature. A member of the French Academy, he was very close to all liberal Catholics, who constantly praised him. Paris’s liberal salons celebrated his poetic soul and literary gifts. With such notability, Father Gratry could not fail to take a position on infallibility. No opportunity to do so seemed better than to refute the Archbishop of Mechelen, Victor-Auguste-Isidore Deschamps.
Like Dom Guéranger, Archbishop Dechamps had followed Lamennais in his youth. When fighting in Belgium for the freedom of the Church, he signed his articles as “A. Deschamps, a disciple of Lamennais.” After his ordination, he became one of the great names of Belgian Catholicism. The archbishop declared himself for papal infallibility before going to the Council. Father Gratry then published a series of Lettres à Mgr. Deschamps. The volume purported to prove that infallibility was untenable both theologically and historically. Father Gratry claimed he wrote on the orders of God and Our Lord Jesus Christ.
A poet and literate man, Father Gratry was unprepared to discuss these problems from his point of view. Still, his articles spread far and wide because of his prestige and the support of opposition bishops, especially Bishop Dupanloup. In them, he made gross errors, confused dates, placed in the second-century events that took place in the fifth, and cited sources imprecisely and sometimes erroneously. Despite all this, he accused the Ultramontanes of being “deceived by the blind passion of a certain number of writers and the mediocre good faith of many; in short, by deliberate falsifications.”
Dom Guéranger could not remain silent. He submitted Father Gratry’s articles to fierce criticism, laying bare his blatant errors and the lack of theological or historical foundations. In the ensuing polemic, Dom Guéranger gave his contender no quarter. Father Gratry’s antics went so far that the bishops demanded that he submit to imprimatur everything he intended to publish on theology, but in vain. The stubborn oratorian continued the dispute. Dom Guéranger crushed him.
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Emile Ollivier, whose liberal credentials are beyond suspicion, made this assessment of the polemic:
“Dom Guéranger, the restorer of the Benedictine Order in France, was a scholar in divine law in the full sense Saint Benedict gives this word; he knew where to pick up things old and new. He learned much and well and expressed what he knew firmly, in a precise, firm language, whose only concern was to adapt entirely to the thought and not to exceed it in any sense. Father Gratry meditated in a workroom flooded with light, his face turned toward the celestial vault, and his gaze lost in space. Dom Guéranger did so in the seclusion of a cell, with his head bent over books of the sacred Doctors, immersed in time. He obtained through tireless work what Father Gratry was looking for in the stars. It was not difficult to predict the outcome of a theological clash between these two so differently gifted minds: the former would be pleasant, specious, eloquent but reckless and inaccurate; the latter, much less literary and rapturous, would prove instructive, convincing, peremptory, solid. One might fear that the oratorian, a light and charming poet, spreading his seraphim’s wings and not hiding at the right moment, would succumb to a mallet blow from the giant Benedictine.”
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