The orthodoxy of Janus and his abettors is impeachable in another no less serious point. The church has ever been conscious of her own infallibility, whereby she is protected from all error in teaching "all truth to the nations;" in other words, it has ever been firmly believed among Catholics that the ecclesia docens, or teaching church, succeeded to the divinely bestowed privilege of apostolic infallibility, and, whether congregated in council or dispersed throughout the world, is a true exponent of "unity in faith and grace" with her divine Founder. If this were not so, in what possible sense could the church be called "a pillar and ground of truth"? Where would the assistance and guidance of the Holy Spirit have any visible action or influence, if it be not to preserve her "immaculate, holy, and pure"? Hence, those beautiful images employed by the Apostle St. Paul, of the "union of the body with the head," of this truly spiritual alliance of Christ with his spouse, that is, the church, through whose ministry the life of Christ descends from the head to the members, Christ's life being nothing else but truth and grace.
But if we adopt Janus's idea of the church, she has become as the "harlot of Babylon," a depositary of falsehood and iniquity. For he denies the unerring authority of œcumenical councils under the conditions in which it has always been received as a dogma by Catholic theologians. The oath of the bishops toward the apostolic see, prescribed for many past centuries, is pronounced by Janus as incompatible with "that freedom of deliberation and voting" which are essential to such an assembly. But, we may ask, does this oath interfere in the least with the strict obligation of keeping the faith intact and inviolable? Does this oath imply any violation of Catholic conscience? You might as well assert that the oath taken by a member of Congress, or of a particular legislature, to support and abide by the constitution, interferes with his liberty of speaking and voting. In keeping with this hypothesis of Janus, all the councils that were held in the west, and universally acknowledged as œcumenical, "were perverted, and mere tools of papal domination—shadows of the councils of the ancient church." (P. 154.) But the councils held in the east were truly œcumenical, because the popes had nothing to do with them, (pp. 63, 64;) but the emperors, on the contrary, exercised all those prerogatives which the popes afterward usurped; hence the councils in the west were but a "sham and mockery" when compared to the genuine œcumenical councils held by the emperors, "who sometimes trenched too closely on this freedom." (P. 354.) Yet the weight of imperial power and domination does not do away with that essential condition of an œcumenical council. But with the popes the case is quite the reverse! Truly admirable logic of our Janus! He is not content with unprincipled expositions and illogical hypotheses, but resorts to positive falsification of history when he says,
"Neither the dogmatic nor the disciplinary decisions of these councils (held in the east) required papal confirmation; for their force and authority depended on the consent of the church, as expressed in the synod, and afterward in the fact of its being generally received."
And again,
"The popes took no part in convoking councils. All great councils were convoked by the emperors; nor were the popes ever consulted about it beforehand." (Pp. 63, 64.)
What is the verdict of history on these points? That very Latrocinium of Ephesus, in 449, which Janus so adroitly would put among those councils that were regarded as œcumenical, called forth a protest not only from Pope Leo the Great, but also from the eastern bishops, because the ambitious Dioscorus assumed to himself the right of presiding, and, as Prosper and Victor remark in their chronicles, "usurped the prerogative of the supremacy." The most ancient historians, Socrates, Sozomenus, and Theodoret, who continued the church history of Eusebius, attest unanimously those prerogatives of the Roman bishop, which our authors would so boldly deny. Thus, Sozomenus, in the third book of his history, chapter 10, says,
"It is a pontifical law (νὁμος Ιερατικὁς) that whatever has been done without the judgment of the Roman bishop, be null and void."
Socrates, alluding to the Arian Synod of Antioch in "Encæniis," in 431, by the adherents of Eusebius, Patriarch of Constantinople, and which pronounced the deposition of St. Athanasius, observes,
"Neither Julius, the Bishop of Rome, was present, nor did he send any one thither to take his place; though it is prohibited by ecclesiastical law that any thing be decreed in the church without the consent of the Roman pontiff."[84]