_Rome, April 17, 1870._—It is a good sign that the minority have at length
recognised the imperative necessity of grappling directly with the problem
of papal infallibility, and examining in their own writings this question
on which the future of the Church depends. It has been perceived now that
it was an unfortunate notion to put forward only grounds of expediency,
discretion, and regard for public opinion; for no answer was left when
Spanish, South American, Irish, Neapolitan and Sicilian Bishops said that
no such public opinion existed with them, that some were apathetic and
others had long held the doctrine, which would create not the slightest
difficulty or inconvenience with them, and that they were the majority.
It was high time therefore to take firmer ground, and now this has been
done by Cardinals Schwarzenberg and Rauscher and Bishop Hefele, three of
the most influential prelates of the Church, or rather by four, for Bishop
Ketteler too has either composed or got some one to compose a work on
papal infallibility.(84) But the whole edition had the ill luck to be
seized in the Roman Post-office, so that not a single Bishop got a copy.
The authorities seem to know that the work opposes the dogma, on which all
the thoughts and plans of the _Curia_ now hinge, although Ketteler not
long ago showed himself an adherent of the doctrine, and only assailed the
opportuneness of defining it.
The _Univers_, as the official organ of the Court, now announces the
principle on which the Papal Government acts. One must distinguish, it
says, between the Custom-house and Post-office. The Custom-house gives the
Bishops the missives and packets addressed to them unopened, for it
assumes that they will only have proper books sent them. It is different
with the Post-office, which is bound not to favour the dissemination of
error.(85) So the conscientiousness of the officials of the Roman
Post-office is a model for the rest of the world, and it is understood
that the habitual opening of letters, so far from being immoral, is an
expression of the purest and most delicate morality; for might not a
letter contain some error or attack on the rights of the Vicar of Christ?
And how could the officials answer to God and His earthly representative
for even unconsciously co-operating in the spread of such error?
As I have not seen Ketteler’s publication, I can only quote the judgment
of a friend who has read it and thinks it will do good service. The other
three works are before me. They must all have been printed at Naples, for
the Roman police has to look after the consciences not only of the
Post-office secretaries and letter-carriers, but of the compositors,
printers, bookbinders and booksellers. It cannot allow that any breath of
error should sully the pure mirror of their souls, even though concealed
under the veil of the Latin tongue; and the corroding poison becomes worse
when prepared, as in this case, by Bishops and Cardinals.(86)
I will speak first of Cardinal Rauscher’s work, which is the most
comprehensive of the three, and touches on many questions passed over in
the other two. Written in a calm and dignified tone, it carefully avoids
every word or phrase which could offend the _Curia_, and goes to the
utmost length in making concessions possible for any one to accept without
becoming an infallibilist; but it will nevertheless pour much oil on the
flame of anger which has been blazing for weeks past, and singes now one
Bishop and now another. Papal infallibility, says the Archbishop of
Vienna, must extend to everything ever decided by any Pope, and the whole
Christian world must hold with Boniface VIII. and his Bull _Unam Sanctam_
that the Popes have received power from Christ over the whole domain of
the State. That will be welcome news to those who want to exclude the
Church altogether from civil society. That the Popes themselves in the
ancient Church did not hold themselves infallible, that the whole history
and conduct of the ancient Church in doctrinal controversies would be an
inexplicable riddle on the infallibilist hypothesis, and moreover that the
Popes have often fallen into open errors rejected by the Church—all this
is well established, though the author cites only some particular facts
from the abundant sources he has to draw upon. He then shows the sharp
antithesis between the ancient doctrine of the Church and the Popes on the
relations of Church and State and the enunciations of Popes since Gregory
VII. and Innocent III. With papal infallibility the whole mediæval theory
of the unlimited power of Popes to depose kings, absolve from oaths of
allegiance, abrogate laws, and interfere in all civil affairs at their
will, must be declared to be an immutable doctrine with which the Church
stands or falls. The Christian Emperors would have treated such a doctrine
as high treason, and even in the days of Charles the Great it would have
excited universal astonishment. If this doctrine really had to be preached
now to the Christian people, it would be a triumph for the enemies of
religion, for the best men would soon be convinced of the utter
impossibility of paying any regard to the precepts of the Christian
religion in civil matters. The Cardinal proceeds to dwell on the forgeries
by which the great master of scholastic theology, the favourite and oracle
of all Jesuits and ultramontanes, Thomas Aquinas, was led to adopt the
doctrine of infallibility, and how again his influence shaped the whole
scholastic system and drew the great Religious Orders, who were bound by
oath to maintain his teaching, to adopt it. He concludes in these weighty
words:—“If the Pope is declared to be, alone and without the Episcopate,
infallible in faith and morals, the Œcumenical Councils are robbed of the
authority recognised by Gregory the Great, when he said he honoured them
equally with the four Gospels; for they would be and would always have
been, even at the time of the Nicene Council, superfluous for deciding on
faith and morals. This doctrine would be a declaration of war against the
innermost convictions of the Church, and she would be robbed for the
future of those aids supplied by the Council of Trent at her extremest
need; even the See of Rome would lose the support the Bishops then
assembled gave to it, for after the close of that Council, the power of
the Popes became greater than it was before.”
The remark of Cardinal Rauscher that, when the dogma of papal
infallibility is defined the Church will be deprived of one of her most
effective institutions, viz., General Councils, has made a great
impression here, as far as I can see. It is readily understood that an
assemblage of men, educated to believe in the infallibility of one master,
and to repeat mechanically without examination whatever he tells them,
would have no influence among men and would be universally regarded as
superfluous, a mere idle pageant rather than any real support to the
Church. The Church would be impoverished by the loss of one member of its
organism, and that very member would be paralysed which in moments of
distress and danger had most effectually protected her.
Bishop Hefele’s work is worthy of the man who is beyond question the most
profound historical scholar among the members of the Council. One can only
regret that a writer so pre-eminently qualified to pronounce a clear and
weighty opinion on the whole controversy in all its bearings should have
confined himself to the single question of the condemnation of Pope
Honorius. Those who wish to know the history of Honorius and the Sixth
Council in 681, and to see a flagrant example of the utterly crude and
unscientific poverty of that modern scholasticism which is treated as
theology in the Jesuit lecture-rooms, may be recommended a brief study of
this question, which has already produced so many writings and hypotheses,
simple and easily understood as it is in itself. A General Council,
acknowledged by the whole Church in East and West, condemned a Pope for
heresy after his death, and anathematized him on account of a dogmatic
letter he issued. The sentence was without contradiction accepted
throughout the whole Church, the Roman Church included, and even
introduced into the profession of faith to which every new Pope had to
swear at his election. It was repeatedly confirmed by subsequent Councils,
and in short remained in full force for centuries, till the Popes were
seized with a desire to become infallible. It is only since the fifteenth
and sixteenth century, and especially since the Jesuits—beginning with
Bellarmine—undertook to revise history according to the requirements of
their new dogmatic system, that this extremely contradictory fact had to
be submitted to a process of manipulation, and the rock on which all
schemes of papal infallibility seemed to be wrecked had to be got out of
the way. “Si plus minusve secuerit sine fraude esto,” was said in the old
Roman law which allowed a creditor to cut a pound of flesh from the body
of his debtor, and so do the knives of the Jesuits and curialists cut
right into the flesh of history. The Acts of the Sixth Council were said
to have been corrupted through the perfidy of the Greeks, and the whole
history and even the letters of Honorius to be forgeries. The Popes
themselves, Rome, and the whole West had let themselves be fooled by the
cunning Greeks into condemning an innocent and orthodox Pope as a heretic,
and the letters of Pope Leo II. must also be forgeries. In short these
reasoners were caught in the meshes of their own net, and when in 1660
Lucas Holstein got the Roman _Liber Diurnus_ printed—an excellent edition
of which Rozière lately brought out in Paris—the whole impression was
suppressed, for it contained the old form of oath which expressly attested
the condemnation of Honorius. But twenty years later the book appeared to
the great chagrin of Rome, and the infallibilist school had to change
their front. They now turned to the letters of Honorius and tried to show
that they were perfectly orthodox. But that did not touch the fact that a
General Council had solemnly condemned a Pope for heresy, and that the
whole Church—the Popes and the Roman Church included—had accepted the
sentence without demur. Hefele has shortly and pointedly exposed the
shifts and dishonesties of this long controversy carried on in more than a
hundred polemical works; and he has taken care, at the same time, to
establish conclusively the wide-reaching facts and general results of the
inquiry. He shows (page 11), how up to the eleventh century every Pope
swore to the truth that an Œcumenical Council had condemned a Pope for
heresy.(87)
Cardinal Schwarzenberg’s work is chiefly directed against Archbishop
Manning.(88) Hitherto the infallibilists, to avoid pushing their theory
into sheer absurdity, had appended the condition of _ex cathedrâ_, which
everybody could interpret more or less stringently according to his own
view, and theologians had actually given twenty-five different
explanations of what was required for an _ex cathedrâ_ decision. In order
to get out of this labyrinth, Manning has propounded a simpler theory.
Everything according to him depends on the Pope’s intention; whenever he
“intends to require the assent of the whole Church,” he is infallible.(89)
Schwarzenberg points out with pungent irony to what monstrous consequences
this would lead. He recalls the saying of Boniface VIII. that the Pope
holds all rights locked up in his breast. And thus it must be assumed on
Manning’s theory that the Pope holds in his own mind all doctrines present
and future, and draws from this internal treasure-house under divine
inspiration what he wishes to reveal to the world, so that infallibility
becomes inspiration. Has it occurred to the Cardinal that this is
precisely the personal opinion of the very man who has now, for the sake
of his own infallibility, resolved to plunge the Church into an internal
conflict, of which no one can see the end?
It is then further pointed out that, if the new dogma with its
consequences prevails, all Governments will put themselves in an attitude
of self-defence against the Church. Bishops as well as Councils cease to
be any necessary part of the _magisterium_ of the Church, and there is no
longer any need for the distinct assent of the Episcopate; the only office
left them is to praise and accept with thanks every decision of the
Pope’s. Perhaps they may still be allowed to give their advice before he
decides, but they have nothing to say to the decision itself or after it,
but only to obey and promulgate the papal revelations.