There has been a recent resurgence in the study of all manner of topics in early modern Catholicism: from women intellectuals, to the Catholic Enlightenment, to the many fascinating developments in theological, moral, and political thought, to the myriad forms of popular piety around an increasingly global Catholic community. Inspired by this renewed interest, my colleague Richard Yoder and I recently co-edited an anthology of Jansenist sources in collaboration with an excellent international team of men and women. Jansenism: An International Anthology, part of Catholic University of America Press’ Early Modern Catholic Sources series, features thirty-one texts spanning the period 1630–1810. Translated from Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Arabic, almost all of these texts appear in English for the first time.
While certain classic, early French sources might be familiar to some readers (e.g. Pascal and the women of Port-Royal), the intellectual diversity and geographical reach of the Jansenist movement is typically not so well known. By taking this broader perspective, the Anthology shows how Jansenism was at the nerve center of so many disputes in early modern Catholicism. Jansenists and their wide array of sympathizers and detractors were not just concerned with the classic debates over grace and penance; they ended up—deliberately or through happenstance—arguing over non-Christian religions, liturgical reform, Bible reading, religious toleration, constitutionalism, monarchy, and democracy, global missions, the Enlightenment, the rights of conscience, the limits of authority, and the roles of women, the laity, the papacy, diocesan bishops, and ecumenical councils. In a sense, to study Jansenism in the manner our team lays it out in the Anthology—internationally, including the voices of lay men, women, nuns, bishops, and politicians, and over a nearly 200-year timeframe—is to study early modern Catholicism writ large, in all its great controversies, successes, and failures. Consequently, we hope our Anthology helps to fill the need for more (and better) primary sources in English for those teaching in this period or beginning academic studies of their own.
One of the texts we include is an excerpt from the liturgical decrees of the infamous Synod of Pistoia, a Jansenist-led diocesan council held in Tuscany in 1786. If known at all, the Synod of Pistoia is remembered as a failed attempt to instantiate many practices that only widely came to fruition in the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), including the vernacular Mass—a fact noted with interest by many historians, but bemoaned by Catholic Traditionalists as a confirmation of Vatican II’s supposedly rotten genealogy.[1] Recently, Traditionalist prelates like Carlo Maria Vigano and Athanasius Schneider have evoked the Synod of Pistoia as a purported dress-rehearsal for the calamites of Vatican II and Pope Francis’ synodality.
In its own day, however, the Synod was one of the most profound challenges to the papacy between the Reformation and the French Revolution. The theological and pastoral decrees of these radical Jansenists “sent shockwaves through Catholic Europe,”[2] appalling defenders of the status quo but delighting “Reform Catholics” and “enlightened” enemies of ultramontanism and “superstition.” The Acts and Decrees of the Synod, published in Italian to underscore the importance of the vernacular, were quickly translated (in whole or in part) into Latin, French, Spanish, German, and Arabic. These texts and ideas spread around Europe, across the Atlantic to Central and South America, and even to the Melkite Catholic community in Lebanon. Pope Pius VI, reeling from the French Revolution, hesitated to strike back for fear of the Habsburg Grand Duke of Tuscany, Peter Leopold. He and his older brother, Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, protected Jansenists in their territories and encouraged many of their radical reform experiments. But when St. Peter’s keys were finally loosed eight years later, they clanged with gusto: eighty-five of the Synod’s propositions were condemned in Pius VI’s bull Auctorem fidei (1794). After the decisive defeat of the Jansenist movement in the early nineteenth century, those championing the resurgent papacy regularly referenced the condemned “Pistoians.” These references were almost always second-hand, however, eventually via knowledge of the Denzinger doctrinal handbook, which printed all of Auctorem fidei’s condemnations. The subsequent story was, of course, written by the “winners”—in this case, the proponents of the restored and thoroughly ultramontane church of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since Vatican II, however, there has been periodic interest in this strange moment in church history, when a group of Jansenists (purportedly a gloomy, elitist sect) seemed to anticipate many of the most compelling, overdue, and cherished of Vatican II’s reforms: an emphasis on the lay baptismal priesthood, active participation in the liturgy, increased use of the vernacular in the Mass, and an emphasis on personal Bible reading.
We present substantial portions of the Synod’s liturgical decrees in English translation for the first time. This introductory essay is neither a summary of the Synod of Pistoia, of its local and almost immediate failure, or of the long history of evocations of the renegade “Pistoians” through Vatican II and up to our day (I have done so elsewhere). Rather, this essay will summarize the pedigree of these reforms in the early modern church and the logic of the papal rejection of the Synod of Pistoia—a magisterial condemnation which had a profound impact all the way to Vatican II, and even during the proceedings of the Council itself. This remarkable confrontation between competing visions of Catholicism helps us better understand radical aspirations for liturgical renewal in the early modern Church. By shedding light on the dynamic, fraught, and oscillating nature of Catholic reform from Trent to Vatican II, the myths of a static, sterile, or monolithic early modern Church are exposed.
The Synod of Pistoia as a Radical Culmination of Early Modern Liturgical Reform
The Pistoian liturgical and devotional decrees sought to concretely instantiate reformist impulses which went back to the origins of the Jansenist movement and in some cases beyond.[3] Recent scholarship casts Jansenism as part of a wider story of the contested reception of the Council of Trent (1545–1563) in the early modern church. While Trent reached agreement on a number of very important matters, it intentionally left some pivotal questions of both doctrine and practice unresolved, either because a consensus could not found or because Trent wanted to respect the “freedom of the schools” (i.e. the legitimate diversity of Catholic theological traditions).
Jansenism was born out of one of these unresolved tensions. Many decades later, these extreme Augustinians essentially accused the Jesuits of reviving Pelagianism after the Council of Trent.[4] While the initial Jansenist critiques centered around divine grace and the confessional, from the very beginning these “Friends of the Truth” were also concerned with restrictions on vernacular Bibles and with lay participation at Mass.[5] These also were questions that the Council of Trent had not resolved. To use American football language, Trent had “punted”—that is, the Council had declined to resolve the issues, because the council fathers had disagreed, and Trent’s stated goal was to unite Catholics as much as possible against erroneous Protestant positions, but to avoid definitive rulings on contentious issues that divided Catholics among themselves.
This careful balance becomes clear when we read certain key canons closely. For example, Trent did not actually ban Mass in the vernacular, but left the question open: session 22 (September 17, 1562) decreed only that it did not seem expedient that the Mass be celebrated in the vernacular everywhere or indiscriminately (passim).[6] Canon 9 of the same session anathematized the claim that a sotto voce Latin eucharistic prayer must be condemned, or that Mass must be celebrated only in the vernacular (sotto voce was the custom of the eucharistic prayer being delivered by the priest in a low voice or a whisper).[7]
Along the same lines, it is true that after Trent, the Roman Index of Forbidden Books imposed severe restrictions on the reading of scripture by the laity and the diffusion of vernacular Bibles (the infamous Rule Four). A restrictive attitude prevailed in Spain, Portugal, and much of Italy. We should recall, however, that many other Catholics and their governments ignored the Roman Index, and/or had their own regulatory practices. The common adage in France was Index non viget in Gallia (“the Index has no validity in France”), and there were also approved vernacular Bibles in the Netherlands and in English- and German-speaking lands.[8] The liturgical and devotional program of the Synod of Pistoia grows directly out of these unresolved, neuralgic debates. This reformist program is often, and correctly, associated with the Catholic Enlightenment. However, the Pistoian vision for public worship and private prayer was also the culmination of over two centuries of Catholic calls for reform.
From the origins of the movement, Jansenists championed the right of women and the laity to have access to the Bible in their mother tongue, and to make scripture and the Mass the center of devotional life. Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), the doyen of Jansenist theology and the defender of the nuns of Port-Royal, lambasted those who sought to restrict women from reading scripture. Jansenists and some other reformist Catholics came to also advocate for vernacular missals, for the laity to respond to the priest during Mass (instead of just the altar servers), for at least some parts of the liturgy to be said in the vernacular, for vernacular hymns, for the priest to pronounce the eucharistic canon aloud, and for laity to receive Holy Communion during the Mass itself rather than after. The first full translation of the missal from Latin into French, in 1660, was interpreted as a Jansenist provocation by opponents. Pope Alexander VII condemned this French missal in 1661, but it remained available since it was inserted into a famous commentary on liturgical feasts.[9]
Pope Clement XI’s Unigenitus (1713) condemned 101 propositions extracted from a very popular vernacular biblical commentary written by a leading Jansenist named Pasquier Quesnel. This led to a new and more bitter stage of controversy. In a stunning act of dissent, four French bishops formally appealed Unigenitus to an ecumenical council (our Anthology includes the text of the Appeal in English). These four “Appellant” bishops were joined by almost 90% of the theology faculty of the Sorbonne, three-fourths of the parish priests in Paris, and ten additional French bishops. One of many reasons this ill-fated papal document was so controversial was because it seemed to condemn a number of edifying ideas regarding liturgical participation and Bible reading, rooted in the writings of the church fathers and the scriptures themselves:[10]
The condemnation of various Propositions tends not only to extinguish the sacred fire that our Lord Jesus Christ came to spread on earth, but also to snatch away this divine Light that the faithful of every age, sex, and social condition may derive from a devout reading of Holy Scripture, which is generally proposed to all.[11]
Unigenitus polarized French Catholicism and periodically caused serious divisions in the church for almost a century. A flood of publications protested it. One remarkable pamphlet, Letter of a Woman of Paris to the Pope (1714), kept the marginalization of women at the center of the debate.[12] The author, writing under the pseudonym “Ursule de La Grange” (possibly Françoise-Marguerite de Joncoux), directly appealed to Clement XI with great frankness and moving pathos: “I throw myself at the feet of Your Holiness to say the same words that the wise Abigail once said to the Prophet David: ‘May this fault, my Lord, fall on me. Only allow your servant to speak to you, and do not refuse to hear her’ [1 Samuel 3].”[13]
By no means all Catholics promoting liturgical reform and vernacular Bible-reading were Jansenists. Indeed, the most important Catholic reformer of the eighteenth century, the “enlightened” priest-scholar Lodovico Muratori (1672–1750), was no Jansenist.[14] The first papally approved Italian Bible since the promulgation of the Roman Index was the work of an Archbishop of Florence with sterling anti-Jansenist credentials (his complete translation was published in 1778). Nevertheless, the systematic program of liturgical and devotional reform that reached a confident and even aggressive crescendo in the late eighteenth-century was steeped in Jansenist sources and rhetoric. Scipione de’ Ricci (1741–1810), Bishop of Pistoia-Prato and convener of the Synod of Pistoia, was firmly rooted in the sources above, and honored the original Jansenists and the Appellants (along with more moderate figures like Muratori). The Acts of the Synod of Pistoia openly and repeatedly call on this legacy, and sometimes repeat the language of their Jansenist forebears verbatim. Tuscan dioceses had been flooded by “good books” which included Italian translations of French Jansenist classics and literature protesting Unigenitus. Consequently, a papal Rome fearful of its precarious position and anxious to assert authority and continuity could only see the Pistoian Synod as the latest attack of a Jansenist Hydra, a persistent and malevolent subversive force that simply refused to die.
The Roman Response and the Long Shadow of Anti-Jansenism
The Synod of Pistoia proved to be “the last great manifestation of the Jansenist movement in Europe.”[15] The Acts and Decrees of the synod, translated into multiple languages, spread quickly throughout the Catholic world, sparking impassioned denunciations and defenses, as well as curiosity from Protestants.[16] Similar efforts at radical synodal reform were attempted by prelates in German lands, the Kingdom of Naples, among the “Constitutional” clergy in revolutionary France, and as far afield as Lebanon.
In excommunicating those who swore allegiance to the French Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1791, Pius VI had declared war on Reform Catholicism. He and his advisers believed that the time for caution was over—they understood the Synod of Pistoia both as an ecclesiological virus that would act as a carrier for the principles of 1789, and as a revival of the Jansenist system already condemned in the bull Unigenitus. The spread of Pistoian decrees and the widespread sympathy they garnered around the Catholic world was thus an existential threat to the status quo at every level.
Auctorem fidei’s eighty-five condemnations covered myriad doctrinal and disciplinary subjects. Let us just consider two of the bull’s most important censures of the Pistoian liturgical reform. The editorial footnotes to the translated decrees list which assertions from the synod’s acts were condemned in Auctorem fidei, along with the grade of censure (“false,” “rash,” “erroneous,” etc.). Let us include here, however, the full text of two of the most important censures related to our topic, and then examine the thinking of the drafters.
Condemning the Synod’s reform of the liturgy, including the use of the vernacular, Auctorem fidei §33 reads:
The proposition of the synod by which it shows itself eager to remove the cause through which, in part, there has been induced a forgetfulness of the principles relating to the order of the liturgy, “by recalling it (the liturgy) to a greater simplicity of rites, by expressing it in the vernacular language, by uttering it in a loud voice,” as if the present order of the liturgy, received and approved by the Church, had emanated in some part from the forgetfulness of the principles by which it should be regulated [see the Pistoian Decree on the Eucharist, §6], is rash, offensive to pious ears, insulting to the Church, and favorable to the charges of heretics against her.[17]
Condemning the Pistoian attempt to encourage lay participation in the liturgy, Auctorem fidei §66 reads:
The proposition that asserts that “it is contrary to apostolic practice and the counsels of God not to prepare easier ways of uniting the voice of the people with that of the whole Church” [see the Decree on Prayer, §24], if understood to mean that the use of the common language should be introduced into the liturgical prayers, is false, rash, disruptive of the order prescribed for the celebration of the mysteries, and easily productive of numerous evils.[18]
The Vatican’s Archivio Apostolico (AAV) and the archives of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the CDF) hold comprehensive records of the deliberations of the papal committee tasked with investigating the Synod of Pistoia and drafting the bull Auctorem fidei. Therefore, it is possible to reconstruct the precise doctrinal and pastoral perspectives behind the condemnations. Doing so sheds great light on why the pope and his ultramontane allies saw Jansenist liturgical and devotional reform as so threatening.
As the archival files make clear, the drafters of Auctorem fidei saw themselves as really doing battle with a kind of singular heretical entity. On these liturgical and Biblical questions, they saw the errors of Wycliffe, Jan Huss, Luther, Calvin, Erasmus, the early Jansenists of Port-Royal, and now the Synod of Pistoia as part of a chain of errors. The pope and his advisors understood the aggressive Jansenist calls for reform as the most recent link in this chain of errors, and not as an attempt—however misguided or imprudent—to implement a biblical or patristic ressourcement (as the Pistoians themselves argued they were doing, though without using that yet-to-be-coined term).
There were a number of notable interventions in the special committee Pius VI set up to investigate the Synod of Pistoia. Cardinal Guglielmo Pallotta concluded his judgment by arguing that, in addition to censuring the Pistoians for “attacking” the Council of Trent, the censure “suspect of heresy” could also be justified due to the Synod’s “perverse desire for innovation.”[19] Many cardinals pointed out that the obvious implication of Pistoian liturgical theology was that Mass would be preferable in the vernacular, a conclusion that was obviously unacceptable. Cardinal Vitaliano Borromeo cited the Council of Trent session 22 on the vernacular (see above) but did not include the word passim (“everywhere” or “indiscriminately”). This was a revealing omission, which suggested a quasi-official interpretation of Trent that went beyond the actual text.
The bitterest voice on the pope’s committee was Cardinal Marcantonio Colonna. In his view, the Pistoians were even worse than Pasquier Quesnel (the target of Unigenitus) because Quesnel attacked those who “took away” the consolation of joining their voices to the Church’s in public prayer (Unigenitus §84), whereas the Synod censured those who did not provide the easiest means to the people. If the “infallible Oracle of the Vatican” (as Colonna called the pope) did not hesitate to condemn Quesnel, how much more so should the Pistoians be condemned? While Quesnel left the implementation of his maxim open, the Pistoians had laid bare their plans: they wanted bilingual prayer books and missals, and they translated Psalms and liturgical songs into Italian (Pange lingua, Tantum ergo) for public use. There were reports that the Passion was being sung in Italian on Good Friday!
Colonna argued there were many means already available for bringing the laity into the heart of worship: preaching, catechisms, and approved spiritual books. Translating the liturgy and the scriptures is “dangerous” and a “stumbling” block, especially for “uneducated people, women, and children” who cannot understand “the true sense.” The Synod thus took “a different, and dangerous road” from that of the Church, which led to error. Indeed, Cardinal Colonna wondered, how could an illiterate person, a country person, or a woman fulfill this obligation? Not by reading Latin texts and probably not by reading vernacular texts either. Thus, Colonna argued that the logic of the Synod pointed in one direction: to a vernacular Mass pronounced aloud. For Cardinal Colonna and, as indicated at least by their votes, for the rest of the committee this was not just imprudent, it was erroneous. The Synod of Pistoia’s liturgical vision was therefore, in Colonna’s word: “full of dangers, and stumbling blocks, and therefore rejected, and prohibited by the Church.”
Conclusion: “The Most Grave Pastoral Reasons” for Reform
On October 22, 1962, less than two weeks after the Second Vatican Council opened, the Franciscan theologian Ferdinando Antonelli argued that there were “the most grave pastoral reasons” to reform the liturgy. Since the Middle Ages, according to Antonelli, the laity had been relegated to the role of “mute spectators” when they ought to be “actors” in worship. Antonelli’s statement was particularly weighty because it was a relatio, that is, the official commentary on a text presented for debate.[20] It was on the basis of theological principles such as the baptismal priesthood of all believers and the importance of active participation (participatio actuosa) that this future cardinal introduced the schema on liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium) which led to a reform of Roman Catholic worship so dramatic it could hardly have been imagined by those present in the aula that day.
How did the official structures of the Catholic Church go from the restrictive condemnations of Auctorem fidei to the sweeping reforms of Vatican II and the postconciliar period? A comprehensive answer would require decades of research spanning almost two centuries of church history, but I will conclude with four brief observations I believe point us in the right direction.
First, Jansenism, as a movement, had long been extinct. While those calling for liturgical and devotional reform were sometimes negatively associated with the memory or “ghost” of Jansenism, that tactic was getting less and less effective as time wore on. Additionally, the near-total defeat of Gallicanism and conciliarism at Vatican I, and, crucially, the government structures that nurtured such ecclesiastical systems, had passed away. This opening for a modern libertas Ecclesiae allowed for a new kind of papal openness to reform. The papacy, consequently, was increasingly “freed” to turn its attention to pastoring a global church, a task that required more openness to enculturation and diversity (Emile Pereau-Sassine persuasively argued for certain counter-intuitive continuities between Vatican I and Vatican II along these lines).
Second, by Vatican II’s opening in 1962, Catholics had been wrestling with historical consciousness and with explicit theories of doctrinal development for well over a century. This had various impacts, but a particularly crucial one was a lessened anxiety about strict material continuity in all matters. To clash with Unigenitus or Auctorem fidei, at least in a judgment that did not look dogmatic, such as those on liturgy or Bible-reading, was not necessarily a deal-breaker (a Sicilian archbishop, concerned about the liturgical reform and further use of the vernacular, actually did evoke the condemnation of the Pistoians in response to calls for reform like Antonelli’s, but he was mostly ignored).[21]
Third, the ressourcement paradigm associated with “new” theologians like Yves Congar and Joseph Ratzinger had begun to penetrate into the upper echelons of the hierarchy and even gained the sympathy of Pope John XXIII. Therefore, dramatic calls for reform rooted in the thought and practice of the early church were not seen as disloyal, crypto-Jansenist, or “easily productive of numerous evils.” Rather, such calls were, at least potentially, solid and Catholic, despite the possible implication of a “forgetfulness of principles” on the part of the contemporary Church.
Fourth, the official commitment of the papacy and the council to ecumenism had vast consequences. In the context of liturgical, devotional, and biblical reform, this new ecumenical orientation included a desire to appeal to non-Catholic Christians, and to remove, where possible, stumbling blocks. This is at the antipodes of Pius VI’s fear that the Pistoian reform was “favorable to the charges of heretics” through the implicit admission that certain current Catholic practices (or even doctrines) were, at best, not ideal. The drafters of Auctorem fidei were enmeshed in a polemical, zero-sum game pitting Catholicism against Protestantism. In this context, any implication that Protestants might have had something right in their critiques of Catholic doctrine or worship (as opposed to moral critique) was manifestly unacceptable. Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism, on the other hand, recognized that any “deficiencies . . . in the way that church teaching has been formulated” should be corrected (Unitatis Redintegratio §6), and practices or manners of speech which confuse or offend non-Catholic Christians could be subject to revision or change. This posture of good faith and humility—already present at Vatican II and even more so in postconciliar ecumenical documents—was unthinkable in the fraught and triumphalist climate of the late eighteenth century. My contention, then, is that the most radical element of Vatican II reform was John XXIII’s decision to commit the Catholic Church to the path of ecumenism. We are still in the process of discerning what this commitment means for our theology, the way we narrate our history, and the type of future we are journeying towards as the “pilgrim church” on earth.
EDITORIAL NOTE: The decrees of the Synod of Pistoia can be found here.
[1] I cite and comment on many of these sources in Shaun Blanchard, The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II: Jansenism and the Struggle for Catholic Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 1–21.
[2] Dale Van Kley, “Civic Humanism in Clerical Garb: Gallican Memories of the Early Church and the Project of Primitivist Reform 1719– 1791,” Past and Present 200 (2008): 77–120, at 78.
[3] Enrico Bini: “Mysteria mystice. La pronuncia del canone della messa: Dibattiti teologici ed esperimenti liturgici nel settecento Italiano,” Memorie Teologiche 8 (2015): 57–153. Blanchard, The Synod of Pistoia; Keith F. Pecklers, “The Jansenist Critique and the Liturgical Reforms of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Ecclesia Orans 20 (2003): 325–339.
[4] See Guido Stucco’s excellent introduction to his recent translation of Jansen: The Predestination of Humans and Angels: Augustinus, Tome III, Book IX., Early Modern Catholics Sources Series, (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022).
[5] For an overview of the history of Jansenism, emphasizing continuity and development, see Shaun Blanchard and Richard T. Yoder, “An Introduction to Jansenism,” in Blanchard and Yoder, eds. Jansenism: An International Anthology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2024), 1–64.
[6] See Trent, session 22, chapter 8, “Doctrine and Canons on the Sacrifice of the Mass” (Denzinger-Hünermann 1749). “Non tamen expedire visum est Patribus, ut vulgari passim lingua celebraretur.”
[7] Denzinger-Hünermann, 1759.
[8] See, inter alia, the following studies: Maria Teresa Fattori, “Vernacular Bible Translations and the Roman Inquisition in Italian History between the XVI and XVIII Centuries,” in Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 109.3/4 (2014): 656–97. See also the discussion of Maria Teresa Fattori, “The Council of Trent in the Eighteenth Century: Benedict XIV’s De synodo dioecesana,” in Peter Walter and Günther Wassilowsky, eds., Das Konzil von Trient und die katholische Konfessionskultur (1563– 2013) (Freiburg: Aschendorff, 2016), 417– 59, at 436– 39; Els Agten, The Catholic Church and the Dutch Bible: From the Council of Trent to the Jansenist Controversy (1564–1733) (Leiden, Brill, 2020); Gigliola Fragnito, La Bibbia al rogo: La censura ecclesiastica e i volgarizzamenti della Scrittura (1471–1605) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997).
[9] L’année chrétienne (published between 1677 and 1686), by Nicolas Le Tourneux (1640–1686), a philo- Jansenist preacher and pastor. This paragraph is adapted from my book The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II, see especially 80–83.
[10] See Denzinger-Hünermann, 2479–2486. The parenthetical Bible verses refer to the passages on which the author, Pasquier Quesnel, was commenting: “(79.) It is useful and necessary at all times, in all places, and for every kind of person, to study and to know the spirit, the piety, and the mysteries of Sacred Scripture [1 Cor. 14:5]; (80.) The reading of Sacred Scripture is for all [Acts 8:28]; (81.) The sacred obscurity of the Word of God is no reason for the laity to dispense themselves from reading it [Acts 8:31]; (82.) The Lord’s Day ought to be sanctified by Christians with readings of pious works and above all of the Holy Scriptures. It is harmful for a Christian to wish to withdraw from this reading [Acts 15:21]; (83.) It is an illusion to persuade oneself that knowledge of the mysteries of religion should not be communicated to women by the reading of Sacred Scriptures. Not from the simplicity of women, but from the proud knowledge of men has arisen the abuse of the Scriptures and have heresies been born [John 4:26]; (84.) To snatch away from the hands of Christians the New Testament, or to hold it closed against them by taking away from them the means of understanding it, is to close for them the mouth of Christ [Matt. 5:2]; (85.) To forbid Christians to read Sacred Scripture, especially the Gospels, is to forbid the use of light to the sons of light, and to cause them to suffer a kind of excommunication [Luke 11:33]; (86.) To snatch from the simple people this consolation of joining their voice to the voice of the whole Church is a custom contrary to the apostolic practice and to the intention of God [1 Cor 14:16].”
[11] See the text of the Appeal, cited in “The Appeal of the Bull Unigenitus to an Ecumenical Council,” in Blanchard and Yoder, eds., Jansenism: An International Anthology, translated by Guido Stucco, 203–213, at 209.
[12] The entire pamphlet is translated from the French by Elizabeth Huddleston: “Defending the Right of Women to Read the Bible,” in Blanchard and Yoder, eds. Jansenism: An International Anthology (CUA, 2024), 196–202. For the original, see Ursule de la Grange, Lettre d’une dame de Paris au Pape sur Constitution de 8. Septembre 1713 contre Le Nouveau Testament, avec des Réflexions morales. Nouvelle édition (n.p., 1714).
[13] Ibid., 197.
[14] For selections from Muratori’s classic Della Regolata devozione dei Cristiani (1747) on liturgy and access to scripture, see “The Fight Against Superstition: Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750),” translated by Shaun Blanchard with the assistance of Glauco Schettini, in Shaun Blanchard and Ulrich L. Lehner, Catholic Enlightenment: A Global Anthology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2021), 21–37. See also Ulrich Lehner’s recent translation of key sections of another Muratori classic: On the Moderation of Reason in Religious Matters (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2024).
[15] Peter Hersche, “Die Auswirkungen der Synode von Pistoia (1786) auf Deutschland, insbesondere auf das Erzbistum Mainz,” Archiv fur Mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte 41 (1989): 275–94, at 275.
[16] Pietro Stella, ed., Atti e decreti del concilio diocesano di Pistoia dell’anno 1786, 2 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 1986), 2:111–146, 658–662. See also Stella, ed. Il Giansenismo in Italia II/I: La bolla Auctorem Fidei (1794) nella storia dell’Ultramontanismo; Saggio introduttivo e documenti (Rome: Libreria Ateneo Salesiano), 1995. For “echoes” of the synod in multiple national contexts, see the many essays in Claudio Lamioni, ed., Il sinodo di Pistoia del 1786: Atti del convegno internazionale (1986) per il secondo centenario Pistoia- Prato, 25–27 settembre 1986 (Rome: Herder Editrice e Libreria, 1991).
[17] Denzinger-Hünermann, 2633.
[18] Denzinger-Hünermann, 2666.
[19] All of the following reports are in Archivio Apostolico di Vaticano, fondo Pistoia, folder 15.
[20] See Antonelli’s relatio of 22 October 1962 on the schema De Sacra Liturgia (which became Sacrosanctum Concilium) in Acta I/ 1, 304–8 (draft schema at 264–303).
[21] See the intervention of Giovanni Battista Peruzzo, Passionist Archbishop of Agrigento, in Acta I/1, 594–598. Peruzzo saw the Pistoians along the same line as the committee that condemned them—as a link in a chain of errors running back to the Reformation or even earlier.
