Friedrich Engel-Janosi: „Liberaler Katholizismus und päpstliche Autorität bis zum Syllabus“

Engel-Janosi’s essay reconstructs liberal Catholicism as a transnational Catholic response to the collapse of older political and ecclesiastical certainties between Enlightenment, Revolution, Napoleon, 1848, and the Syllabus of 1864. Its central claim is that liberal Catholicism was never simply a party program or a borrowing from secular liberalism. It emerged from many Catholic attempts to rethink authority after the Church had lost the shelter of throne, privilege, and police power.

Der liberale Katholizismus war — man ist versucht zu sagen: ‚selbstverständlich‘ — nicht das Werk eines Mannes; er entstand aus dem, was man das Zusammenfließen vieler Quellen nennen könnte.

English translation: Liberal Catholicism was — one is tempted to say, "as a matter of course" — not the work of one man; it arose from what might be called the confluence of many springs.

The essay’s genealogy therefore reaches behind 1789. Engel-Janosi finds anticipations in Fénelon’s critique of absolutism, in Jansenist moral seriousness, in Manzoni’s Catholic sensibility, and especially in the spectacle of Pius VII confronting Napoleon without worldly strength. This reversal mattered: the Church could now appear less as coercive institution than as suffering moral witness. From that experience arose the hope that papal authority, freed from dependence on states, might become the guardian of freedom rather than its enemy.

So begann man einzusehen, daß liberaler Katholizismus etwas anderes sei, mehr sei als eine neue politische Einstellung, daß es sich um eine neue Geschichts- und Religionsphilosophie handle, deren Konsequenzen weithin reichten: „Make a new departure“; habt den Mut, einen neuen Anfang zu setzen.

English translation: Thus one began to see that liberal Catholicism was something other, something more, than a new political attitude — that it was a matter of a new philosophy of history and religion whose consequences reached far: "Make a new departure"; have the courage to set a new beginning.

Engel-Janosi’s comparison of national settings gives the essay its force. In France, Lamennais, Lacordaire, Montalembert, and Ozanam sought liberty of press, association, education, and conscience while defending Rome against Gallican subordination to the state. Their early ultramontanism was thus not yet identical with later centralizing anti-liberalism; it was a strategy for liberating the Church from political tutelage. In Italy, Tosti, Gioberti, Balbo, and Rosmini connected Catholic renewal with national hopes, imagining a papacy that might preside morally over a reconciled and federated Italy. In Germany, by contrast, liberal Catholicism took a more scholarly form around Döllinger and Acton.

Sehr anderer Struktur war der Kreis, der im Zeichen des liberalen Katholizismus sich in Deutschland bildete; er stand im Zeichen der „Wissenschaft“, der Universitäten, wobei die Geschichte auch hier den Vortritt hatte.

English translation: Of very different structure was the circle that took shape in Germany under the sign of liberal Catholicism; it stood under the sign of "scholarship," of the universities, with history here too taking precedence.

This German strand is decisive because it turns history into an ethical discipline. Döllinger and Acton defend Catholic truth not by exempting the Church from judgment, but by insisting that popes, councils, saints, rulers, and revolutionaries stand under the same moral law. Engel-Janosi thus presents historical criticism as a form of religious seriousness: the conscience of the historian becomes inseparable from the conscience of the believer.

Das Mark aller Kulturgeschichte ist ethisch und nicht metaphysisch.

English translation: The marrow of all cultural history is ethical and not metaphysical.

The drama then narrows around Pius IX. His election initially seemed to confirm liberal Catholic hopes: a reforming pope might reconcile Rome, constitutional government, and national regeneration. But the revolutions of 1848, the murder of Rossi, Rosmini’s frustrated role, and the exile at Gaeta transformed the situation. Papal independence became tied to the defense of the shrinking Papal States, even as that temporal power increasingly burdened the Church’s spiritual mission.

Engel-Janosi reads Quanta cura and the Syllabus in this concrete setting. They were doctrinal acts, but also responses to the Italian question, the September Convention, and fears that liberal freedoms meant secular domination. Dupanloup’s distinction between thesis and hypothesis tried to preserve obedience while limiting the condemnation’s practical reach, yet the rupture remained. The essay ends without easy symmetry: liberal Catholicism failed as a dominant program, but it permanently altered Catholic debates over conscience, historical truth, liberty, and papal authority.

Der liberale Katholizismus war und ist geblieben die Sache einer Minorität — wenn man will: einer Elite.

English translation: Liberal Catholicism was, and has remained, the cause of a minority — if one will: of an elite.