_Rome, July 7, 1870._—I must go back a few days and tell you something
more of the speeches made since St. Peter’s Day. It is for the interest of
the contemporary world and of posterity that the Roman system of hushing
up and deathlike silence should not be fully carried out, and that it
should be known what truths have been uttered and what grounds alleged
against the fatal decision of the majority and rejected by them.
Soon after Bishop Martin a man spoke who had gained the highest respect
from all quarters, Verot, Bishop of Savannah, a really apostolical
character, compared in America with St. Francis of Sales. On a former
occasion, on June 15, he had pointedly criticised the conduct of the Court
party and the attempt to surrender all that yet remains of the ancient
constitution of the Church to a centralized papal absolutism. “If,” he
said, “the Pope wants to possess and exercise a direct and immediate
jurisdiction in my diocese, only let him come over to America himself, and
bring with him plenty of the priests who are so abundant here to my
country where there are so few; gladly will I attend him servant and
observe how he, riding about in my huge diocese, judges and arranges
everything on the spot.” And, as some Bishops of the majority had given
out the favourite Roman watchword, that historical facts must yield to the
clearness and _a priori_ certainty of doctrine, Verot replied briefly, “To
me an ounce of historical facts outweighs a thousand pounds of your
theories.” This time he was not interrupted, as he had always been
before,—by most no doubt not understood. Maret too, in the sitting of July
1, attacked the projected absolutism which the Church was now to be
saddled with. In the political world, he said, it is done away with and
disappears more and more under a common feeling of repugnance, and now it
is for the first time to be confirmed in the Church, and Christians, “the
children of heavenly freedom,” are to be reduced, after the protection
afforded by the consent of the episcopate is abolished, to spiritual
slavery, and forced into blind subjection to the dictates of a single man.
He said this in more courteous language than this brief epitome gives
scope for.
Among the most important speeches was that which followed, of Bishop David
of Saint Brieuc in Bretagne. It was one of the speeches of a kind I said
in an early letter would not be tolerated, the result has refuted me. The
Bishop said that the proposed article of faith was first invented in the
fifteenth century, when a new form, different from that ordained by
Christ, was given to the Church, at the expense of the inalienable rights
both of the Bishops and the faithful. If the hypothesis of papal
infallibility really belonged to the deposit of faith, it must have been
defined and universally acknowledged in the earliest ages, as it would
evidently be a fundamental doctrine indispensable for the whole Church.
The parallel drawn between this and the lately defined and previously
undetermined and open doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is quite
irrelevant. It is clearly evident, he added, that this new attempt to
exalt the Papacy will produce the same disturbance as the earlier one in
the sixteenth century. A sign of it is the sudden and rapidly growing
alienation of the French clergy from their Bishops, which is instigated
from a distance. Passing on to a vindication of the much abused Gallican
doctrine, he showed that the former Popes themselves declared it to be
allowable and only reprobated the attempt to make it into a special and
separate rule of faith for the French Church alone.
The Spanish Bishop of Cuenca, Payà-y-Rico, followed, and began by
affirming in the bragging and bombastic style of his country, that in
Spain the infallibilist doctrine had always prevailed. This was a glaring
falsehood; it would have been enough to cite against him the names of
Tostado, Escobar, Victoria, and others, the Spanish Bishops and
theologians at Trent, and the fact that the Inquisition first made the
doctrine dominant in Spain. But immediate replies are not permitted in the
Council Hall, and the majority were so charmed with his disclosures that
they loudly applauded him. Encouraged by this he turned round upon the
Opposition, observing that a short interval was still allowed them to come
over to the majority, and that, unless they made a good use of it, their
only choice lay between a subsequent meritorious submission or
condemnation for heresy.
The minority, who meet daily either in national or international
conferences, were engaged in drawing up a formula requiring the consent of
the episcopate as indispensable, but soon gave this up and resolved to
abstain from any demonstration, as they could gain nothing by it. Several
thought this would compel the majority, if they really wanted to gain the
concurrence of the Opposition, to make proposals on their side for some
tolerable formula. But at present that is highly improbable.
In the sitting of July 5, where the only business was to vote on the third
chapter, in consequence of the general withdrawal of the speakers, an
unexpected occurrence intervened. Some days before Bishop Martin of
Paderborn had proposed in his own name and that of some of his colleagues
that in a Supplement, designated as a _monitum_, the doctrinal authority
of the Bishops should be mentioned, but only incidentally and in a sense
compatible with the Pope’s prerogative of personal infallibility. When the
Pope heard of this, he was much displeased, and peremptorily ordered that
a canon should be laid before the Council for acceptance enouncing
emphatically and under anathema the papal omnipotence over the whole
Church. The Deputation had already had the third canon printed and
distributed in the following amended form:—“Si quis dixerit, Romani
Pontificis Primatum esse tantum officium inspectionis et directionis et
supremam ipsius potestatem jurisdictionis in universam Ecclesiam non esse
plenam, sed tantum extraordinariam et mediatam—anathema sit.” But in order
to carry out the Pope’s command, the Bishop of Rovigo, as a member of the
Deputation, read the canon in a more stringent form, which in fact left
the extremest absolutist nothing to desire, but which was not in the
printed text and was either not heard or not understood by the greater
part of the Bishops, while yet it was to be voted on on the spot—in
contradiction to the distinct directions of the order of business. This
more stringent version of the canon runs thus:—
“Si quis dixerit, Romanum Pontificem habere tantummodo officium
inspectionis vel directionis, non autem plenam et supremam potestatem
jurisdictionis in universam Ecclesiam, tum in rebus, quæ ad fidem et
mores, tum quæ ad disciplinam et regimen Ecclesiæ per totum orbem diffusæ
pertinent; aut eum habere tantum potiores partes, non vero totam
plenitudinem hujus supremæ potestatis; aut hanc ejus potestatem non esse
ordinariam et immediatam sive in omnes ac singulas Ecclesias, sive in
omnes et singulos pastores et fideles—anathema sit.”
A more shameless outwitting of a Council has never been attempted.
Archbishop Darboy at once rose and protested against this juggling
manœuvre, and the Legates were obliged, humiliating as it was for them, to
let the matter drop for the present; but the addition will be brought
forward again in a few days.
A proof has lately forced itself on my attention of the confusion of mind
habitual to many of the Bishops of the majority. I asked one of them, who
had expressed his surprise that so much fuss was made about this one
dogma, whether he had formed any clear conception of its retrospective
force and examined all the papal decisions, from Siricius in 385 to the
Syllabus of 1864, which would be made by the infallibilist dogma into
articles of faith. And it came out that this pastor of above a hundred
thousand souls imagined that every Pope would be declared infallible, not
for the past but for the future only!(153) But he was somewhat perplexed
when I mentioned to him on the spur of the moment merely a couple of papal
maxims on moral theology, which were now to be stamped with the seal of
divinely inspired truths.
On Saturday the 9th the special voting is to take place on the emendation
just mentioned of the third chapter of the third canon in the interests of
papal absolutism, and on the same day or Monday the whole of the third
chapter and the amendments on the fourth are to be voted on; on Wednesday,
the 13th, the votes are to be taken on the whole _Schema_ “en bloc.” As
yet the Opposition can still be reckoned at 97, exclusive of Guidi and the
Dominican Bishops, who may not improbably come to its aid at the critical
moment.
One of the witticisms circulating here, for which the Council affords
matter to genuine Romans, is the following, that in the sitting of July 4
there was a great uproar among the Bishops, they were all set by the ears
and the Pope himself ran away, and why all this? “E perchè tutta questa
cagniara? perchè il Papa vuole esser _impeccabile_, e i vescovi non lo
vogliono.”