Carol E. Harrison is the 2025 Millicent Mercer Johnsen | National Endowment for the Humanities Rome Prize Fellow and professor in the Department of History at the University of South Carolina. Her project A Women’s History of Vatican I explores how lay Catholic women opposed papal infallibility during the First Vatican Council (1869–70). Through private papers and published writings, Harrison reveals how these women challenged ecclesiastical authority, voiced theological dissent, and navigated the conflict between personal conscience and the Church’s demand for obedience.
The Academy caught up with her in the home stretch of her fellowship year.
Your project reframes Vatican I through the perspective of lay Catholic women who opposed papal infallibility. The nineteenth century can be described as an era of “feminized religion,” yet your research highlights women who resisted aspects of ecclesiastical authority. What alternative models of authority did they propose, and how were these received?
The nineteenth-century women I write about asked for a consultative, conciliar church. They would likely have approved of the Vatican II definition of the church as “the people of God,” and they would have appreciated Pope Francis’s call for synodality, for a church that “walks together.” But they lived in an era in which the Catholic Church rejected democracy and embraced the model of absolute monarchy, a position these women regarded as short-sighted. They were not radicals, though. As far as they were concerned, papal infallibility was the innovation that defied precedent and the judgment of historians. Church tradition called for regular councils in which bishops met and reached consensus on key issues.
Your research dives into private papers and published writings of Catholic women. Are there particular figures whose stories stand out as especially revealing or influential?
Of the four women at the center of my study, I knew the least about Princess Carolyne von Sayn Wittgenstein when I arrived in Rome, so I have spent a lot of time with her over the last few months. Ironically, she is the woman best documented in the historical record, because for over a decade she was the companion and lover of the musician Franz Liszt. There’s a lot of scholarship by music historians asking, “Was she good for Liszt?” After they abandoned their plan to marry in 1860, she made her life here in Rome, and I’ve been reading her letters and learning about her social circle. Various commentators on the Roman scene described her as one of the most important and cultivated women in Rome. With her airless salon packed with bric à brac and the endless cigars that she smoked, she was certainly one of the most eccentric! Princess Carolyne published twenty volumes criticizing church policy, incisively titled Internal Causes of the External Weakness of the Church, parts of which ended up on the Index of Prohibited Books. The censor’s report awkwardly argues that she’s a well-meaning but misguided woman whose words nonetheless threatened the supremacy of the church. Men were excommunicated in the 1870s for much milder statements!
How do tensions between conscience and obedience that these women navigated resonate with contemporary debates about authority and inclusion in the Catholic Church?
Most Catholics today experience the same tension between conscience and obedience. Think about an issue like birth control: nearly all Catholic women in the developed world have decided that their own experience of sex and motherhood is a better guide to family planning than church teaching. Critics often speak derisively of “cafeteria Catholics” who treat their faith like a menu from which they can pick and choose, but this is neither a minority phenomenon, nor a new one—it is fundamental to how Catholics live their faith. Nineteenth-century women similarly decided that their own understanding of society, politics, and God demonstrated that popes were no more infallible than any other men.
How have your interactions with this year’s fellows and residents influenced your work or changed your perspective?
It has been wonderful to have access to archival sources and to a supportive and intellectual community at the same time. Historians usually get them sequentially—if we’re lucky. Archival research is often solitary, even lonely, and then, maybe, you’ll get to write your book among colleagues who encourage your progress and challenge your thinking. This year I am having it all: archives just down the hill in the Vatican or across town in various private collections, and wicked smart friends and colleagues at the dinner table.
I’ve especially learned a lot from my pre-modern and art historical colleagues. Historians of the modern world aren’t always good at thinking about religion because secularization has been such an important paradigm in the humanities and social sciences. We know more about how religion declined than how it flourished. My colleagues at the Academy teach me how to think about how people in the past lived religion on a daily basis, and also how they expressed it artistically.
How did your conceptions of the Academy change over the course of the fellowship?
Of course I knew that a year at the Academy would be great. But I didn’t know that it would be such a good year for Catholic ethnography! Between the church synod this fall—the first in which women participated with a vote—and the conclave this spring, I’ve seen Catholicism in action in a whole new way. It has been an irreplaceable, unreproducible opportunity that will shape my work for years.