Mutual estrangement characterised the relationship between the popes and the Protestant Churches for centuries after the Reformation. Despite occasional ecumenical stirrings, the creation of Protestant state Churches removed formal contact between popes and Protestants from a theological to a diplomatic plane. The concurrent development of Protestant ideas of history, which styled the pope as the Antichrist of prophecy and the consolidation of the Catholic understanding of him as the steward of an exclusive tradition, further eroded the space for dialogue. Only from the nineteenth century onwards did significant changes alter these patterns of understanding. The growth of developmental historicism began to relativise doctrinal differences; whilst the retreat of the confessional state created renewed possibilities for papal–Protestant contact. These shifts prepared the way for the twentieth-century ecumenical movement, which since the 1960s has transformed relations for the better. Whether formal reconciliation can proceed any further, however, remains to be seen.

I propose to situate my contribution in a long chronological sequence that goes from the pontificate of Pius IX to the “Vatican II moment” (including the pontificate of Paul VI). The chapter is structured around three axes. The first takes into account the doctrinal and dogmatic developments that sanction papal primacy without detaching them from the socio-political context. The second evaluates the refusals and acceptance of the model thus developed by questioning the concept of “romanity,” the practices that result from it and the institutional and doctrinal impasses, sensitive under the pontificate of Pius XII. The third axis analyzes the development of the idea of collegiality before the Council and evaluates the conciliar debates before understanding how the pontificate of Paul VI assumes and renews the pontifical heritage of the previous century in the context of the crisis of the 1960s and 1970s.

Chapters Four and Five analyse the intractability of the issues raised regarding the relationship between the church and the commonwealth for the Gallican liberties, which would continue into the seventeenth century. This chapter focusses on the works of three important lawyers: René Choppin, whose neglected De Sacra Politia is a crucial text for understanding the shape of League debates in the 1580s, Pierre de Belloy and Louis Dorléans. These works demonstrate the extent to which late medieval controversies about ecclesiastical power were resurrected in the sixteenth century, and the ways in which caricatured ideas of medieval controversialists like William of Ockham and Marsilius of Padua were used to score significant polemical points.

Chapter 6 examines the particular question of John Locke’s position on the toleration of Catholics. This, the chapter argues, was the major area in which his views did not significantly evolve. Recent scholars have tried to establish that Locke softened his position on the intolerability of Catholics by appealing to a ‘loyalist’, oath-taking minority tradition within the Catholic chapter. This chapter refutes this claim and demonstrates Locke’s lifelong refusal to countenance such Gallican (or, in the English context, ‘Blackloist’) solutions to the Catholic question. When these views of Locke are set in their full context, they emerge as another variation on his rejection of the ‘Hobbesian politique’. Loyalist Catholics after the civil war were strongly influenced by the sovereignty theory of Hobbes and on that basis appealed for toleration as an act of monarchical prerogative. Locke’s hardening opposition to such forms of indulgence alienated him from such strategies. Catholics, he came to believe, were irretrievably dominated by either the papacy or the state and thus could not appeal for religious freedom as an inalienable right.