The Pope and the Professor: 
Pius IX, Ignaz von Döllinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age
 
by thomas howard
oxford, 312 pages, $45

John Henry Newman aside, Ignaz von Döllinger (1799–1890) was the greatest Catholic theologian of the nineteenth century. He came of age amid a golden period in German historical research, a moment that produced Leopold von Ranke and his attempt to know the past “how it actually was.” Döllinger hoped to use history to illustrate the truths of the gospel and to vindicate the Church. In this project, he enjoyed the patronage of a young Bavarian king who sought to cultivate in Munich a university to rival the new university in Berlin. He joined the legendary Munich circle that included Schelling, Joseph Görres, Franz von Baader, and later Johann Adam Möhler, the brilliant theologian from Tübingen whom Döllinger recruited to Munich. Yet the Catholic revival did not last: Schelling published nothing and eventually left for Berlin to take the chair left vacant after Hegel’s death. Möhler died of cholera just a couple years after arriving. Döllinger, meanwhile, began the slow transformation from conservative defender of the faith to skeptic. If scientific history was the test, then Catholic Christianity, in his judgment, was failing it.

In The Pope and the Professor, Thomas Howard juxtaposes Döllinger with Pius IX, the pope who became his nemesis. The young, reform-oriented pope interpreted nationalist infringements on the Papal States through the lens of the French Revolution and the imprisonment of his predecessors. The revolutionary year 1848 decisively shaped his thinking. Without it, he never would have denounced in the Syllabus of Errors the idea that “The Roman pontiff can and should reconcile and adapt himself to progress, liberalism, and modern society.” Nor would he have uttered in response to those doubting the case for papal infallibility, “I am the tradition.”

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