Australian Catholic Bishops and the First Vatican Council 1869-1870

Publisher Description

Australian Catholic Bishops and the First Vatican Council 1869-70 describes in fascinating detail the intellectual challenges and multiple social pressures Catholicism was facing from the Enlightenment and Liberal Democratic processes - ideas that successive Popes had condemned, seeing these as part of a determination to destroy traditional Catholicism from within. The book is more than a history. It is a reflection on the processes within the Council, where infallibility rather than primacy was the focus of much of the debate, and the outcome was the Council's institutionalisation of a monarchical Church, a model accepted and celebrated in Australia, with effects lasting even to our own times.