In summary, Ong's 1958 book is a remarkable work that opens up sweeping perspectives on the print culture that emerged in Western culture, including the Catechism and the Index of Forbidden Books, both of which O'Malley discusses in his 2013 book about the Council of Trent. However, as far as I know, Ong does not discuss the Catechism or the Index of Forbidden Books in any of his 400 or so publications. Nevertheless, because the Catechism is a compendium of propositional statements, I would call attention to the distinction that Ong borrows from the French playwright and Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) between belief "that" (a proposition is true) and belief "in" a person such as God or Jesus the Christ in his (Ong's) 1958 essay "Voice as Summons for Belief: Literature, Faith, and the Divided Self," which is reprinted in the 600-age 2002 book An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (pages 259-275; at 264-265), mentioned above.
(2) O'Malley's Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church (2018)
The First Vatican Council (1869-1870) famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) defined papal infallibility, as O'Malley explains in his 2018 book (see the index for specific page references).
Before Vatican I, Pope Pius IX (born in 1792; reigned 1846-1878) had issued in 1864 the famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) document known in English as the Syllabus of Errors (Latin: Syllabus Errorum), officially rejecting 80 propositional claims that differed significantly from the propositional positions held by the church.
We should note here that whenever an individual person or a group formally declares that he-she-they hold certain propositional claims (such as "We hold these truths to be self-evident" in the Declaration of Independence), others propositional claims can be formulated as real or imagined adversarial positions. Now, I do not expect that the Roman Catholic Church will ever give up its teaching function. Consequently, I imagine that its official teachings could be gathered together in a Catechism. Moreover, I imagine that church authorities, including of course the pope, will fell compelled to defend the church's official teachings against real or imagined adversarial positions. For me, then, these matters are not matters of dispute.
Now, before Vatican I, as O'Malley notes (pages 131, 166, and 197), the English convert to Roman Catholicism (and later Cardinal) John Henry Newman (1801-1890) published the book An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). But Newman's 1845 book had no impact on Vatican I.
However, Ong's "Newman's Essay on Development in Its Intellectual Milieu" is still relevant reading. It was originally published in the Jesuit-sponsored journal Theological Studies, volume 7, number 1 (March 1946): pages 3-45. It is reprinted in volume two of Ong's Faith and Contexts (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992, pages 1-37). For Ong's mature thought about Newman, see Ong's book Hopkins, the Self, and God (University of Toronto Press, 1986, pages 18-19, 24, 90, 95-96, 119, 124-126, and 132-133), the published version of Ong's 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.
Now, thus far, the only instance of a pope declaring a certain matter of faith to be infallible teaching was Pope Pius XII's 1950 encyclical about the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, body and soul, into heaven. Predictably, this definitive statement was controversial. Ong jumped into the controversy by publishing his article "The Lady and the Issue" in the now-defunct Jesuit-sponsored journal The Month (London), volume 192, serial number 1012 (December 1951): pages 358-370. After Vatican II had ushered in a more irenic stance toward non-Catholic religious traditions, Ong reprinted his 1951 article with a lengthy headnote in his 1967 book In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture (Macmillan, pages 188-202).
Incidentally, Ong supplied the foreword to the 1962 book Pius XII and Technology, compiled by Leo J. Haigerty (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing, pages vii-x).
After Vatican I, Pope Leo XIII (born 1810; reigned 1878-1903) issued the encyclical Aeterni Patris (1878; Latin for "Of the Eternal Father"), calling for renewed study of the medieval Dominican theologian St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). Consequently, Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and theology dominated both Ong's and O'Malley's Jesuit training. However, Vatican II downgraded the favored status of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and theology a wee bit, thereby opening the door for faithful and orthodox Roman Catholic thinkers to explore other traditions of philosophical thought and/or carve out their own distinctive philosophical thought, as Ong himself did in his mature work from the early 1950s onward.
But when Ong was a young Jesuit scholastic in graduate studies at Saint Louis University, he published a still useful article about the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas titled "The Province of Rhetoric and Poetic" in the Jesuit-sponsored journal the Modern Schoolman, volume 19, number 2 (January 1942): pages 24-27. It is reprinted in the 600-page 2002 book An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (pages 175-183), mentioned above.
According to Aquinas, philosophical discourse requires operationally defined terms that are used univocally. Even when the terms are used correctly in a formal Aristotelian syllogism, the result of their correct use yields only probabilities, not certainties, about the reasoning involved. Nevertheless, even the greater probabilities of syllogisms in Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and theology tended to foster what Ong later (in 1977; see below) refers to as closed-systems thought, thereby producing a stronger sense of certitude than was warranted about probabilities (according to Aquinas).
Evidently, the Thomists in the Vatican curia who prepared the initial drafts of documents to be discussed at the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) tended to consider syllogism-checked conclusions as certainties. As the bishops meeting at Vatican II sent those initial drafts back for further revision, the spirit of the revised documents tended to shift away from the dialectical philosophical discourse on the initial drafts and moved toward the more rhetorical, and at times perhaps even poetic, discourse of the eventual final drafts of the documents approved by Vatican II and officially promulgated by Pope Paul VI.
Now, after Vatican I, significant world-shaping events had occurred, including World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the rise of Adolf Hitler and anti-Semitism in Germany, the Holocaust, World War II, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the emergence of postwar communism and anti-communism, the Cold War, and the Korean War. In roughly one century between Vatican I and Vatican II, significant changes had occurred in the world.
Now, even though Pope John XXIII's "antennae," figuratively speaking, may not have been "as sensitive as McLuhan's," the aging pope in 1959, three years before the publication of McLuhan's 1962 book, did call for the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). In the 1960 presidential election in the United States, the Irish American Roman Catholic Senator John F. Kennedy (born in 1917) of Massachusetts emerged victorious, signaling the waning of the dominance of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the prestige culture in American culture from colonial times down to 1960. Tragically, President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.
(3) O'Malley's What Happened at Vatican II (2008)
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