The Council assembled for the first time on the appointed day, the 8th of December, 1869. Out of 1,044 bishops, mitred abbots, or generals of orders, who were qualified to sit in the Council, 767 actually attended. The bishops of Poland alone, among European countries, were absent, having been forbidden to attend by the Czar. England and Scotland were represented by twelve or thirteen bishops, the most prominent of whom were Archbishop Manning and Dr. Ullathorne. Ireland sent twenty-three representatives, including Cardinal Cullen, Archbishop MacHale, and the learned and enlightened Bishop of Kerry, Dr. Moriarty. The French bishops were about eighty in number; those of North Germany only fourteen. The total number of bishops from all European countries—except Italy—amounted to 265. The Italian bishops, together with the hundred and nineteen bishops whose sees were in partibus infidelium, formed a total of 276. The missionary bishops—congregating to Rome from all parts of the known world, the expenses of their journey and residence in Rome being borne by the Papal treasury—formed nearly three hundred. It was objected that the representative character of the Council was impaired by the inequality of the relations existing between the bishops and the faithful who composed their flocks. The North German bishops, it was said, were only as one to 810,000 lay Catholics in North Germany; while the bishops from the Pontifical State numbered one for every 12,000 of the laity. Again, it was urged that, whereas in the primitive times one of the most distinctive characteristics of a bishop sitting in a council was that he bore testimony concerning the faith of his flock, this could not be the case with the numerous bishops in partibus now assembled at the Vatican, whose few and ignorant converts, for the most part just reclaimed from barbarism, had no traditional Christianity to put in plea. To all such objections it was replied, on the other side, that a bishop sat in council in virtue of his consecration only and that the doctrine of equal numerical representation had never been received in the Church.
THE VATICAN, ROME.
For the regulation of the order of business the Bull Multiplices inter was prepared, and communicated to the Council at the commencement of its proceedings. It was said that under this Bull the liberty of the Council was abridged to an extent never known in former councils. It lodged in the hands of the Pope the nomination of the presidents of all congregations and commissions and enjoined that any proposition that a bishop desired to bring before the Council should first be laid before a special commission, which should decide on its admissibility and report accordingly to the Pope; without whose permission in the last resort it could not be brought forward. It need hardly be said that Latin was prescribed as the only language to be used in the public declarations.
The first public session (December 8th, 1869) was devoted to the formalities of opening. The proceedings of the Council being suddenly suspended in October, there were but four public sessions altogether. The second was held on the feast of the Epiphany, January 6th, 1870; when, no decree being at that time ready for discussion, every bishop attending the Council, with the Pope at their head, made the formal profession of his faith by publicly declaring his adhesion to the creed of Pope Pius IV., in which were summed up the principal dogmatic definitions and decrees of the Council of Trent. In the course of January several Schemata, or rough drafts of decrees, were introduced into the Council and referred to the several examining commissions. The first was the Schema De Fide: it was headed, in its original form, by a preamble containing language of a very disparaging nature respecting Protestantism, to the influence of which it ascribed Rationalism, Pantheism, Atheism, Socialism, etc., which it proceeded to condemn and anathematise. The second Schema related to Church discipline, and was brought in on the 14th of January; it dealt chiefly with the duties of bishops. The third Schema, De Ecclesiâ, on the Church and the Papal primacy, was brought in on the 21st of January; it originally contained three chapters, but a fourth was added in the circumstances presently to be related.
The repugnance to the doctrine of Papal Infallibility—or, at any rate, to the opportuneness of its definition at the present juncture—had been now so loudly expressed by a number of bishops (chiefly French and German, but with a sprinkling of English and Americans) that the majority in the Council began to fear that the advisers of the Pope would recommend the postponement of the subject to a future occasion. Wherefore a petition, or postulatum, was prepared, soon after the session of the 6th January, praying the Pope that the doctrine of the infallibility of the Chair of Peter might be defined; this was signed by five hundred bishops. The Governments of France and Austria, alarmed at this intelligence, thought that the time was come for exercising a pressure in a contrary direction on the Papal Court. Count Daru, then Minister for Foreign Affairs, instructed the Marquis de Banneville, the French Ambassador at Rome, to inform Cardinal Antonelli of the desire of the French Cabinet to be informed beforehand of all proceedings of a political nature that were taken by the Council, and of the decidedly adverse opinion of the said Cabinet against any definition of Papal infallibility. The Austrian Minister held similar language. Cardinal Antonelli replied to Count Daru in a long despatch written in March, when the prospect of the adoption of the dogma was increasingly favourable, denying that the Concordat existing between France and Rome gave the French Government any right to demand the special information required and claiming it as the privilege and the duty of the Council to proceed to the doctrinal definition deprecated by the French Cabinet, which he hoped would be greeted by the faithful everywhere as "the rainbow of peace and the dawn of a brighter future." It has been stated that the French Government replied to this letter from Cardinal Antonelli, stating that, as he determined to pursue a course that could only end in its ruin, France would for the future abstain from interference; but that on the day of the declaration of Papal Infallibility the Concordat would cease to be valid, the State would separate itself from the Church, and the French troops would be withdrawn from the Papal territory. It is certain that the resolution to withdraw the French troops, which was officially communicated by the Marquis de Banneville to the Holy See on the 27th July, was arrived at before France had sustained any military reverses, and may therefore have been prompted, or at least accelerated, by the proclamation of the dogma; but it does not appear that the menace of treating the Concordat as invalid was ever acted upon in the smallest degree; it seems probable therefore that the terms of the despatch were not in reality quite so stringent.
In reply to the petition of the five hundred bishops, a counter-petition was prepared by the opposition, and received a hundred and thirty-seven signatures, chiefly those of French, German, and Hungarian bishops. But the signers of this document—which was drawn up by Cardinal Rauscher—were careful not to commit themselves to an unconditional hostility to the dogma. They were content with pointing out the stumbling-blocks and dangers by which the question was surrounded—the thorny controversies, supposed to be long since buried, which it would disinter and quicken into a disastrous activity—and the as yet unresolved difficulties that passages in the history of the Papacy opposed to the belief in its infallibility.
The controversy, both in and out of the Council, waxed hotter and hotter, especially when the Infallibilists, emboldened it would seem by the hesitating and qualified character of the opposition, as expressed in the counter-petition—brought in in March, and annexed to the three chapters of the Schema De Ecclesiâ already submitted, the celebrated fourth chapter, containing the dogma itself fully formulated. But for the moment discussion ran upon the Constitution De Fide, which was rapidly approaching maturity. The opposition required, and finally with success, material alterations in that portion of the preamble which said so many hard things of Protestantism. In the end, the offensive preamble was withdrawn and a new one drawn up which the minority could agree to. The Constitution De Fide was adopted unanimously in the public session of the 24th of April, all the bishops present voting placet, but eighty-three adding the words "juxta modum," by which was meant that the signer adhered to the constitution in a particular sense attached by himself to its terms and not in any other sense. Strossmayer alone absented himself from the voting.
The Constitution De Fide being now out of the way, that of De Ecclesiâ, with its new fourth chapter, was pushed forward with the greatest ardour. The opposition resorted to the press and several remarkable pamphlets by men of note appeared. One of these was by the learned Hefele, lately appointed Bishop of Rottenburg. It was a discussion of the well-known case of Pope Honorius, condemned for heresy by Pope Agatho and a council in the year 680. Other brochures on the same side were written by Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, the Cardinals Rauscher and Schwarzenberg and Archbishop Kenrick of St. Louis. The first meeting for the discussion of the Constitution De Ecclesiâ was held on the 14th of May and the debate was continued during three weeks. The principal speakers in support of the dogma were Cardinal Patrizi, Cardinal Cullen, the Archbishop of Malines, and Moreno, the Cardinal Archbishop of Valladolid. One of the most able and effective speeches was that of Dr. Cullen, who endeavoured to convict Hefele of self-contradiction, by contrasting the conclusions of his late pamphlet with the account given of Pope Honorius in his Church History. Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, made an earnest and powerful speech against the decree; and Simor, the Primate of Hungary, Jussuf, the Patriarch of Antioch, and Dr. MacHale, of Tuam, spoke on the same side. The discussion dragged on wearily. June arrived, and with it the burning heat and unwholesome air of a Roman summer; and still the names of forty-nine bishops were inscribed as desiring to take part in the discussion. At this point the majority exercised their right of closing the debate and the general discussion was brought abruptly to an end on the 3rd of June. Several weeks were then consumed in the consideration of the chapters, paragraph by paragraph. The voting on the fourth chapter, that enunciating the dogma, came on on the 13th of July. As finally settled, the definition was expressed in the following terms:—