By Cuthbert Butler, O.S.B.

The First Vatican Council is a landmark in the history of the Catholic Church. Not since the momentous Council of Trent, held from 1545 to 1563, had a pope invoked his apostolic authority to open an ecumenical council, as Pope Pius IX did on December 8, 1869, in St. Peter’s Basilica. In 1869 as in 1545, storms buffeted the Barque of the Church, threatening to subvert and submerge its mission. To confront and refute errors which fueled the storms of modernity: this was the mission of the Council.

To tell the story of that mission and appraise its success is the work of Cuthbert Butler in his two-volume study, The Vatican Council, based on on the letters of the Benedictine monk and bishop, William Ullathorne, whose attendance at the Council produced reams upon reams of detailed correspondence. From these letters, Butler develops an absorbing account of the Council and of the men who took part in it, their hopes, fears, and motivations, and their efforts to accomplish that mission of teaching and defending Catholic truth and condemning error—as they understood it to be. 

Originally published in 1930, Butler’s account was the first to appear in English, and its two volumes quickly became the subject’s standard. The book of a generation, in the words of Francis Augustine Walsh, O.S.B., The Vatican Council gives a comprehensive, living, and faithful account of this landmark event in Church history. 

In this Ecumenical Council, supported by the Word of God written and handed down as we received it from the Catholic Church, preserved with sacredness and set forth according to truth, we have determined to profess and declare the salutary teaching of Christ from this Chair of Peter… (Dei Filius, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith

Cuthbert Butler, O.S.B. (1858–1934) was an Irish monk of the Order of St. Benedict and a Church historian. Abbot of Downside Abbey (1906–1922), Butler was also an accomplished author, contributing over fifty articles on monasticism and saints for the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911); his books include Western Mysticism (1922), Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit (1930), and his best-known work, the two-volume The Vatican Council (1930).

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Paperback: 310pp.

ISBN: 978-1685954406