Thirteenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

This paper introduces the ecclesiological model of the ‘Catholic archive’. Influenced by Derridean and Foucauldian philosophy, the Catholic archive is attentive to how knowledge is privileged or rejected based on prevailing conceptions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. It also notes the vanishing point between theological and political discourse as they pertain to ecclesial governance. As an example of the Catholic archive, this paper analyzes the theo-political significance of Thomas Aquinas’s theology within the Catholic archive throughout the papacies of Leo XIII and Pius X (1878-1914) and the Modernist Crisis. As a response to social and political instability in the nineteenth century, Vatican I consolidated power within the ecclesial hierarchy. What the hierarchy lacked, however, was the archival capacity to determine orthodox from heterodox knowledge. Leo XIII provided this capacity in his encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), where he makes Aquinas an unassailable standard of orthodoxy. This transformation influenced Pius X’s suppression of the Catholic Modernists. In Pascendi Dominici Grigis (1907), Pius X uses Aquinas as a theological litmus test to identify and discipline modernist theologians. The theological renewal of Leo XIII’s papacy became a reign of terror in Pius X’s, in which the hierarchy’s interpretation of Aquinas legitimated archival violence: censorship, excommunication, and religious intolerance. The Catholic archive not only provides a new framing of the theo-politics between the Vatican Councils but can reveal how hegemonic expressions of orthodoxy can be used to suppress and discipline identities that do not conform to traditional notions of Catholicity within the contemporary Catholic Church.