The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal (59 page)

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’s
¹¹¹
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 politics, 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.…
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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.

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.