The complaints about the Rules, and the desire of the majority for something to expedite business, were to produce some effect at last. When between two and three months had passed without a single one of the much-prepared Drafts being homologated, as the Scotch would say, by the Council, it was time to do something. The plan of shaping Rules for the Council without the bishops was resorted to once more. New Rules were given out as an edict, just as the original ones had been, and were headed A Decree, as if the Council itself had framed them. To allow the conclave to make rules for itself, or to amend those imposed upon it, would have been a dangerous approximation to ancient conciliar forms. It had become even clearer than had been foreseen, that a free Council would be a less docile instrument than the sort of Secret Consistory which had been so cleverly devised.
The statement of Vitelleschi, that the Rules provided for the printing of the speeches and their distribution among the Fathers, is not correct; and his further statement, that they gave the Presidents the right of cutting short any speaker, is inexact. All they give is the ordinary right of calling a speaker back to the question, ad propositam quæstionem ipsum revocare.[325] But it is a different question, whether the Presidents did not take this as containing the power of cutting a speaker short. Immediately after its promulgation, Haynald made a quotation to prove that a Pope had, at the time when the Breviary was being revised, expressed an opinion contrary to that now held by the majority, and the President immediately requested him, says Vitelleschi, to come down from the pulpit. That certainly is much more than calling him back to the question. Friedrich relates this scene as one in which signs of impatience, given both by voice and feet, were general among the majority, even Cardinals making demonstrations. So Cardinal Capalti seized the bell and called the speaker to the question. The Archbishop insisted that it was the duty of the majority to hear him; but Capalti told him that they evidently would not hear him, and he must stop.[326]
La Liberté du Concile adds an important particular.[327] Haynald had been attacked by a Belgian bishop for an opinion expressed by him in a speech. He immediately asked leave to reply; and, in order to observe the Rules to the letter, he went to the bureau of the Presidents, and requested leave to speak on a personal point—the false interpretation put upon his speech. Leave was refused, but the Presidents told him that he could take the opportunity of explaining when he should speak in another debate. He waited for weeks. On the day now in question, before commencing to speak, he told the President that, after his speech, he meant to reply to the attack which had long before been made upon him. He was authorized to do so. But no sooner had he begun to present his personal defence, than the majority interrupted him with violent clamour. Instead of enforcing respect for the dignity of the Council and the liberty of speech, one of the Presidents cried to the speaker, "You see that they will not hear you." And when Haynald represented that he had been authorized to defend himself, "Hold your peace and come down" (Taceas et descendas), cried Cardinal Capalti, who thus took the place of Cardinal De Angelis, the Senior President.
It was on February 22 that the new Rules were delivered, and on March 1 more than one hundred prelates, of all nations, sent in a solemn protest to the Presiding Cardinals. This was all they could do, short of leaving the Council. They begin by pointing out that the new Rules professed to preserve the liberty due to bishops of the Catholic Church; but that, in most respects, it seemed as if their liberty was diminished by them, and even exposed to abolition.[328] The Rules said that, when new Drafts of Decrees were distributed, the Fathers were to send in their remarks and suggestions in writing, and the Presidents would allow a suitable time for so doing. The petitioners represent that this might do for ordinary matters, but when grave questions of dogma were to be discussed, the time allowed should be very ample, and the wishes of those who wanted an extension of it should be met.
The Rules said that, after the committee had considered such remarks and suggestions as might have been sent in, they should present the Draft to the Council amended, and with it a summary report containing a mention of the remarks and suggestions which had been made. The hundred bishops say that a mention is not enough. That would leave the committee free to omit what it pleased. The remarks and suggestions ought to be given at full, else the committee would become the entire Council, and, in most things, the only judge.[329] Moreover, the reasons assigned by authors of remarks and suggestions should also be given. They request, further, that authors of suggestions should have the right of explaining them, and, if need be, of defending them before the committee. The idea of a right of reply, which the original Rules had completely ignored, had been, after a fashion, introduced into the new ones. That is, the members of the committee were to have the right of reply, either at once or on a later day, to any one speaker, or to a number of them. The hundred bishops do not challenge this immense power granted to the committee, but they demand that the speaker so replied to shall have his right of rejoinder.
The hundred strongly reclaim against a provision for closing a discussion by a rising and sitting vote. This, they say, is a mode of voting unknown in Councils, and is liable to haste, to error, and to the contagion of momentary feeling. It might be quite allowable in parliamentary proceedings, where a thing done this year may be undone the next. But it is not admissible in a case where the matters in hand are so awful and irrevocable as Decrees, which once adopted are never to be amended or discussed again. They demand that no question should be closed so long as any one who had not spoken claimed his right to do so as a witness and a judge of the faith. They demand also that speakers should be heard alternately, one for and one against any proposal under consideration; and, moreover, in matters affecting the faith, that no discussion should be closed so long as fifty Fathers objected. They strongly urge that, in a General Council, neither precedent nor propriety requires that many Decrees rashly adopted shall be preferred to a few thoroughly sifted.
They then come to the solemn point, as to how many votes suffice to make a dogma? The new Rules did not require a majority of two-thirds, as many political constitutions provide in a case of importance. They left the decision open to a simple majority. This the hundred bishops treat as a total and astounding novelty. In General Councils, moral unanimity in matters of dogma had been the rule. It was a rule accepted, and avowedly acted upon, at Trent, by Pius IV. No other rule would be consistent with the principle of Vincent of Lerins, "What has been believed always, everywhere, and by all." Catholic dogmas being formed by consent of the Churches, it followed that they could not be defined in a Council except by the consent, morally unanimous, of the bishops who represent those Churches. They assert that this condition is the pivot on which the whole Council turns. This condition, they proceed to say, seems to be the more urgent in the Vatican Council, because so many Fathers were admitted to vote, as to whom it was not clear whether they held their title to do so by ecclesiastical or by divine right.
Thus indicating the fact that, first, a majority had been made up largely of men who represented nothing, and that now that majority was to be used to change, not only the dogmas of the Church, but the very source and criterion of dogma, they proceed to a sorrowful declaration, that unless the point as to the numbers voting was conceded, their consciences would be burdened with an intolerable weight. They should have fears that the œcumenical character of the Council would be called in question; that a handle would be given to enemies for attacks on the Holy See and on the Council; and that thus the authority of the Council would be undermined among the Christian people, as though it had been lacking in truth and liberty; and in these troublous times that would be a calamity so great that a worse could not be imagined.[330]
"Thus," cries La Liberté du Concile, "you have a hundred bishops who say, Oppression is couched in these Rules. We have liberty indeed, but liberty restrained, garrotted; which can be choked whenever they like. Imo etiam tolli posse videatur. They say more. They say that these Rules contain a grave menace, a flagrant violation of Catholic tradition, an intolerable oppression of their conscience, pregnant with the greatest perils for the future, capable of striking the Council to the heart and of inducing incalculable misfortunes. That is said by one hundred bishops."
The foundation formed by such a rule of faith as the consent of the Churches seemed solid as long as streams were shut off, but now that the waters were rising the bishops began to feel symptoms of a shaking. They did not, however, yet know that one rush from a sluice, to be suddenly opened by the Pope himself, was, ere they rose, to bear that sand clean away, and to drop them down on to a rotten rock of Roman infallibility. Even the consent of the Church was to be dispensed with.