The Council is only mentioned as "approving" of this absorption of its own powers into those of its head. The part thus allowed to this so-called Œcumenical Council, this Senate of Humanity, in framing Decrees, is less than the part allowed to the College of Cardinals in the framing of Bulls. Take, for instance, the Bull of Convocation. It expressly says that, in issuing it, the Pope acts not only with the consent of the Cardinals, but by their counsel.
This expresses more than "with the approbation." All, therefore, that the collective episcopate did for the College of Cardinals was somewhat to curtail its relative legislative importance. Alone, both its counsel and consent were recognized. When united with all the bishops, only its consent. This looked like telling the bishops that their counsel was superfluous. In the Bull history conquered dogma. The counsel and consent of the Cardinals was the memento of the historical fact that the Bishop of Rome originally spoke with authority only when he spoke as the mouthpiece of the local clergy. In the Decree dogma conquered history. The Bishop of Rome alone was to appear as speaking with authority, and all other bishops were to appear only as approving, but neither as counselling nor confirming; as for the clergy, they were no longer of the Teaching Church. The substance of the Decrees passed was perfectly innocent. They had, moreover, the advantage of exactly copying the acts done in the first session at Trent, while destroying the forms there employed. In the Acta of that Council two resolutions, declaring the Council opened, and fixing the day for the second public session, were entered as constituent acts, before the heading given to Decrees of the constituted body began to be used. The two constituent resolutions were not even headed by the name of the Council, while the name of the Pope does not occur in the heading of any of the Decrees, much less does it stand as the sole legislative authority.
At Trent it was not a private member of the Council, like Bishop Valenziani, but the first presiding legate, Cardinal De Monte, who read out the draft of a resolution, in the form of a question declaring the Council opened. To this question the Fathers "all with one consent answered, Placet." The second resolution was put in the same form. Both, as we have intimated, were entered without the heading of Decrees, and stand as the acts of a body organizing itself, but not as legislative acts of that body when organized. Every subsequent Decree is a real legislative act, and therefore bears the formal heading, "The All-Holy Council of Trent, in the Holy Ghost lawfully assembled ... ordains and decrees."[208]
The formula adopted in the Vatican Council had the advantage of determining, once for all, what that Council was to be, namely, a secret consistory of bishops, to give an approval to Papal Constitutions. Its Presidents were Cardinals, an office unknown to the Christian Church—princes simply of the Court of Rome, though most of them bear the orders of priest. Of the members of the Council a vast number, though called bishops, were really no more than mitred equerries and chamberlains. In the means it took to deprive the diocesan bishops of their inherited powers in Council, the Curia knew its men. Brought up in the sentiment that an effective "function" is the sublimest stroke of civil or ecclesiastical government, it would have been a revolt against all their instincts to disturb a pageant so unrivalled as the one in which they that day had the felicity of bearing a part. The Curia placed them in this dilemma: Either they must rise up amidst that blaze of splendour and resist the act of the sovereign at whose feet they had just bowed, or they must learn at a later stage, if they should then challenge the Rules of Procedure, that the moment for objection was past. The success of the Curia was complete. The general drew out his men for a review, and turned the Thermopylæ of the opposition without having ever seen a Spartan. Those who had come up resolved to oppose changes in their creed soon found that the one pass that might have been held against overwhelming odds was already in the enemy's rear. The Nine had not spent nearly ten months on the Rules of Procedure for nothing.
When this brief episode in the drama of the day had passed over, the doors were thrown open, and the spectators who had been excluded resumed their places. Many of the priests outside would feel disappointed that they had not heard the hall resound with the voices of an acclamation. That would have told that Papal infallibility was adopted without discussion. Friedrich lets it appear that he felt relieved at the opening of the doors before there had been any exulting sound, and doubtless many shared his feeling.
Rumours, persistently kept up, declared that Archbishop Manning would propose the dogma, and that the majority, breaking out into acclamation, would bear down all opposition. If such a design was ever entertained, it had been thought—some say it had been found—that it would prove wiser not to proceed so hastily. The passing of two Decrees in the form of Papal Constitutions was enough to carry "the forms of the house," while the issuing of the Rules of Procedure as a Bull, before the Council was opened, had taken away every pretext for alleging that they were open to revision by the Council itself, as being its own acts.
Archbishop Manning, on his return to England, in a pastoral, treated the rumour of an intended acclamation as if it was only laughable. A reason which he assigns for this is that Rome had had enough of acclamations, seeing that many who acclaimed infallibility in 1867 had openly turned against it. The rumours, however, were too consistent, and too well supported by the hints of the Civiltá and by the plain words of Monsignor Plantier and others, to be prudently dismissed with a smile—at least, anywhere but in England. They were not what Dr. Manning represents them, rumours of an acclamation without a definition, but of a definition carried by acclamation, as in the case of the Immaculate Conception. On the other hand, Archbishop Manning's thrust at those who had in 1867 signed language that might seem to mean everything included in infallibility, without themselves intending to express that doctrine, is natural in one who had not wholly unlearned the Protestant worth of words. Nevertheless, of all grounds on which the prefects of the Pope should begin to trip one another up, the ground to be selected by preference is scarcely that of finesse in the interpretations they put on what they say. As to the part assigned to Dr. Manning personally, it is possible that the rumour represented no more than the fact that both they who hoped for an acclamation, and they who feared it, mentioned the name which occurred to them as that of the most likely instrument of such a procedure, and both happened to pronounce the same name. As if to justify this instinctive selection of both parties, Dr. Manning, on his return home, said that if the Council "had defined the infallibility at its outset, it would not have been an hour too soon; and perhaps it would have averted many a scandal we now deplore."[209]
A Roman noble thus notes the zeal of Dr. Manning—
No one is so devoted as a convert. Having himself erred for half his lifetime did not restrain him from becoming the most ardent champion of infallibility. This circumstance raised a presumption of a deficiency, on his part, in that traditional ecclesiastical spirit which is never fully acquired but by being early grounded and by long continued usage—a presumption which was justified by his excessive and intemperate restlessness. This seemed a cause sufficient to lessen his authority with the Conservative portion of the ecclesiastical world, which judges with more calmness and serenity.[210]—(Vitelleschi, p. 35.)