Most theologians today know one thing about Ignaz von Döllinger: he was excommunicated for his rejection of the First Vatican Council's definition of papal infallibility. Beyond that, he remains mostly unknown. Thomas Albert Howard's study is an excellent remedy for this deficit. It is a balanced, thoroughly researched, eminently readable study of Döllinger's career, with a focus on the conflict over the papacy. Despite its dual title, it is a study primarily of Döllinger. The pope in question, Pius IX, comes in as a decisive part of the Döllinger's context. A strength of the book is the depth and skill with which this context is developed. Nevertheless, Döllinger is the determining focus.

Almost the first third of the book sets the stage for Döllinger's career. An opening chapter describes European Catholicism in the first half of the nineteenth century, with emphasis on the ‘cultural trauma’ of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. A second chapter analyses German Catholicism in greater detail and Döllinger's early life, during which he was shaped both by the development of history as a discipline and by ultramontane tendencies. The third chapter traces Döllinger's increasing alienation from papal claims during the 1860s, culminating in his active opposition to the definition of papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council in 1870. He was unrelenting in his opposition after the Council and was excommunicated by the Archbishop of Munich. A final substantive chapter traces Döllinger's complex involvement with the Old Catholic movement, which he both inspired and carefully kept his distance from, and his role in organising the two Bonn Reunion Conferences of 1874 and 1875. A brief concluding chapter draws some tentative conclusions from the historical narrative.

Howard does not tell a good-guys/bad-guys story. One has little sense of axes being ground in the background. Rather both Döllinger and the partisans of the papacy he was attacking are made understandable in their historical context. In particular, Howard explains the defensive stance of the Catholic Church. Both Pius IX and Leo XIII were present as boys in the crowds that greeted Pius VII back to Rome in 1814 after being kidnapped and held prisoner by the French. To say that Pius IX felt besieged is not a metaphor; he was literally besieged more than once. Sometimes you feel paranoid because they really are out to get you.

Howard is clearly sympathetic with Döllinger and describes him more than once as a tragic figure. He was a brilliant and diligent scholar. Howard does not, however, avoid more problematic sides to Döllinger. His opposition to papal infallibility became increasingly strident; as Howard notes, the debate ‘practically unhinged him’. In addition, Döllinger's opposition was intertwined with German nationalism, his sense of the superiority of a cultured, wissenschaftliche North over a benighted, backward South. His willingness to call on the intervention of the state to halt any teaching of papal infallibility in Catholic educational institutions in Germany is disturbing, especially at a time when the Prussian leadership was assaulting the freedom of the Catholic Church during the Kulturkampf.

A strength of the book is the attention given not only to Döllinger's role in relation to Vatican I, but his organisation and leadership of the Bonn Reunion Conferences. At the time, this attempt to forge an ecumenical alliance of Orthodox, Anglo-Catholics and Catholic dissenters from Vatican I was seen by many as momentous, the formation of an episcopal, non-Roman, catholic, but flexible core around which a future united church could coalesce. The American historian John Williamson Nevin thought Döllinger's work following the Council ‘may be looked back upon as of no less world-historical meaning than the Wittenberg act itself’. In the end, the efforts ran aground on the filioque clause and increasingly anti-western attitudes in Russia. This history is mostly now forgotten, even by ecumenists.

My one cavil with the book is with the reference in its subtitle to ‘the Quandary of the Modern Age’. That Döllinger's story illustrates some particularly modern quandary remains unclear; Howard's careful placement of Döllinger in his historical context works against such an interpretation. Döllinger's quandary seems more a collision of the beleaguered Catholic Church of the late nineteenth century and a particular nineteenth-century German understanding of the discipline of history and its ability to settle normative theological questions. Döllinger's appeal to conscience has little that is modern about it and Howard himself relates Döllinger's difficulties of conscience to Aquinas’ discussion of the duty to obey conscience, even an erroneous conscience. Döllinger's struggles with authority are important in themselves and instructive in various ways, but Howard does not show that they illustrate ‘the quandary of the modern age’.

Even if Döllinger's story is not about ‘modernity’ in some sweeping sense, it still was an important moment in the history of the modern Catholic Church. Howard's book should become the first place to go for those who wish to know what happened.