Sixty-Fifth Letter.
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 [pg 760] 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 [pg 762] 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 [pg 763] 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 [pg 764] 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 [pg 765] 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 [pg 766] 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.”