In the sitting of May 25, MacEvilly, Bishop of Galway, also referred to Kenrick's argument, drawn from the fact that the Catholics of England and Ireland had been admitted to equal civil rights on the faith of repeated declarations, and even of oaths, to the effect that the doctrine of Papal infallibility was not binding on Catholics, and that consequently such edicts of Pontiffs as the Bull Unam Sanctam had not doctrinal authority. To this MacEvilly replied that the Catholics in England had been admitted to equal civil rights, not because of their declarations, but because the English government feared a civil war. The reply of Kenrick to this straightforward utterance is worthy of being given word for word—

The doctrine of Papal infallibility was always odious to the English government, and had it been really a doctrine of the faith, Protestants would have understood Papal doctrine better than English and Irish Catholics; for they knew that Roman Pontiffs had claimed the highest power in temporal things for themselves, and had attempted to drive several English kings from the throne by absolving their subjects from the oath of allegiance.

Catholics, by public oath repeatedly made, denied that such power belonged to the Roman Pontiff in the realm of England, and had they not done so, they never would have been or ought to have been admitted to equal civil rights.[415] How the faith thus pledged to the British government is to be reconciled with the definition of Papal infallibility may be looked to by those of the Irish prelate who have taken that oath as I myself did I cannot solve the difficulty as yet. I am Davus, not Ædipus. Nevertheless those civil rights were conceded to Catholics by men who through a long life had strongly opposed that course. They did indeed apprehend civil war; but they did not dread it in this sense, that a war of that kind could not be otherwise hurtful to the power of the government than by causing a disturbance of the peace for a certain time.

They feared the occurrence of a war, not the result of it, as to which no sensible man could have been uncertain. Those great men preferred to yield rather than to conquer by the slaughter of a brilliant nation, and of a people worthy of a better fate, even in what seemed to them its errors. Oh that here the same spirit of moderation which they exhibited may be displayed by the majority of the bishops who are listening to these words, and that by a prevision of the calamities which may arise to us from this hapless controversy, they may, in circumstances calling for consummate moderation, ward off from us, who are fewer, but who represent a greater number of Catholics than those who are opposed to us, evils which it is not possible to anticipate without horror, and which it would be impossible to repair by a late repentance.

On the one hand, we cannot but regret that these words, fitly written, were not actually spoken in the deaf ears of the resolved majority. On the other hand, we remember that had they been spoken, they would have sunk into the Vatican archives, and would never have been heard of more till those graves give up their dead. They now belong to history, and furnish a living link in a chain of memorable professions and performances. The denationalizing influence of the Papacy had still left something of the citizen alive in the soul of Kenrick. During his stay in Rome, when witnessing the paltry tyrannies that flounced about under the dependent banner of the Pope, all of the citizen that was left in him must have turned with fresh respect to the two flags of the free under which he had spent his days—the flags of England and America. And yet there were those sitting there, each with all the rights of a free man in his hands, planning to reconstruct the society of England and America on the degraded and fettered model of the States of the Roman Bishop. There is a crime which no code has defined—the crime, not of breaking one specific law of one's country, but of contriving, with a foreign pretender, how to overturn everything vital in a venerable and generous legislation.

It was not merely by a pupil of Maynooth that the eager ex-Anglican was considered extreme in his views. Clifford, Bishop of Clifton, spoke on the same day, refuting the notions of Manning about the favourable effects to be produced by his beloved dogma in England, and appealing to him as a witness that an eminent statesman had represented the influence of the recent course of the Curia upon public opinion in England as being much to the disadvantage of their own cause, and greatly to the encouragement of extreme Protestants.[416]

In the next Congregation, on the 28th, it was Senestrey who took the post occupied on the last morning by Manning, that of official respondent against attacks. On that day, a scene was raised by Verot, of Florida. He declared that they were making innovations in the Church, and that such an innovation as the personal infallibility of the Pope was sacrilege. That horrid word applied in the sacred place to an object so dear to the Pope, touched indeed the apple of the eye. Sacrilege! The Cardinals de Angelis and Capalti, says Vitelleschi, quite lost their temper; and a scene ensued which for anger and excitement is said to have fallen but little short of Strossmayer's scene in March.[417] The odious, and to well-tuned Curialistic ears the inconceivable, task of hearing the infallibility of the Pope denied, and of seeing his pleasure daily thwarted under the roof of St. Peter's, was not to be endured any longer. The word passed that the power given by the new Rules to close the debate must be called into requisition.

A trusty American was set up in the next meeting, by the committee, to repair the mischief done by Verot—Spalding, of Baltimore. Here, again, we are indebted for light to Kenrick's unspoken speech. Referring to the moral question which had been raised by Kenrick, to which we have already seen allusions, Spalding said that it called for as much investigation to justify one in giving a negative as in giving an affirmative vote on the question of Papal infallibility, and that in withholding an affirmative vote one would confirm the celebrated Gallican articles.

On May 31, Valerga, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, made a vigorous attack on the minority, speaking cleverly, and hitting hard. Spirited, piquant, and insolent, is the description of Quirinus. Soon afterwards, another American was in the desk, Purcell, of Cincinnati. Quirinus says that he affirmed that the Americans abhorred every doctrine opposed to civil and spiritual freedom; and that the American sons of the Church loved her, because she was the freest society in the world. He also took the position that, as kings existed for the good of the people, so the Pope existed for the good of the Church. On the same day spoke Conolly, Archbishop of Halifax. He seems to be the only one in the Council who really related a theological experience, declaring that he had formerly believed in the personal infallibility of the Pope, and had come to Rome believing that the Augsburg Gazette had circulated a calumny in representing the dogmatizing of this opinion as the real object of the Council. He went on to say that, on finding what was expected of him, he determined to sift the arguments of the Roman theologians and the proofs by which they supported them. He now bore witness to the result upon his own views. All antiquity, he declared, explained the passages harped upon by those theologians, in a sense different from theirs. All antiquity bore witness against the notion that the Pope alone, and separate from the bishops, was infallible. He further took the ground that to found a dogma on the rejection of the traditional interpretation of Scripture was pure Protestantism. I will have nothing, he said, turned into dogma but the indubitable Word of God. Ten thousand theologians do not suffice for me, and on the present subject no theologian should be quoted who lived subsequent to the Isidorean forgeries. To define the dogma would be to bring the Vatican Council into contradiction with the three General Councils which had condemned Pope Honorius as a heretic, to narrow the gates of heaven, to repel the East, and to proclaim, not peace, but war. In reply to Manning, he protested that no one was justified in calling an opinion proximate heresy when it had not been condemned as such by the Church.[418]

On June 3, Gilooly, Bishop of Elphin, replying to some observation of Purcell as to the oaths and declarations, said[419] that Catholics had not denied that they held the infallibility of the Pope as a doctrine of the faith, but as a dogma of the faith; that is as a dogma defined by a General Council. To this, Kenrick's unspoken speech replies, "If that is what was meant, which I do not believe, we might be reproached, and that rightfully and deservedly, with not shrinking, in a very grave matter, from the concealment of our meaning by scholastic distinctions."[420] According to Quirinus (p. 661), Cardinal Bonnechose prevailed upon Cardinal de Angelis to ask the Pope, directly, if he would not consent to a prorogation of the Council on account of the heat, now intolerable to all but Romans, or men from the southward of Rome. The reply was stern and, according to many, savage. Whatever were the terms of it, the substance was indubitable—no adjournment was to be allowed till the Decree of Infallibility was passed. It is said that when Bishop Domenec, of Pittsburg, in America, began his discourse, he was greeted with laughter by the majority, and when he made the very plain and simple statement—one which he might have picked up from any intelligent or travelled Italian any day in the year—that American Catholics were not merely nominal ones, as the Italians were, Cardinal Capalti imperiously commanded silence.[421] Strossmayer had spoken at length on June 2, and with such moderation as to escape even a call to order, yet, it is said, with very great force. On the 3rd, Moriarty, of Kerry, took the side of Purcell, Kenrick, and MacHale, but we have no particulars of his speech.[422] That day Maret was in the desk speaking in the loud and labouring tone of a deaf man, arguing, not only against the convictions and feelings of the majority, but against their personal detestation of himself. He made a point that either the Council was to give infallibility to the Pontiff, in which case the Council must be a higher authority than he, or else the Pontiff was to give to himself an infallibility which he had not previously possessed, in which case he would change the constitution of the Church by his own power alone. Then Cardinal Bilio interrupted, and cried, "The Council does not give anything, nor can it give anything. It gives its suffrage, and the Holy Father decides what he pleases."[423] The representative of all that was left of the once courageous Gallican liberties asked if he might be allowed to proceed, and did so. The minority had a long list of speakers still inscribed. Kenrick was waiting for his turn, and so were Haynald, Dupanloup, and many others; but a fresh surprise was at this point sprung upon them. The Presidents produced a requisition for the close of the general debate, signed by above one hundred and fifty bishops.[424] De Angelis at once called on those who were for the closing of the debate to stand up. He then declared, "A large majority have stood up, and by the power conferred upon us by Our Most Holy Lord (the capitals are official), we close the debate on the general question." The Acta Sanctæ Sedis say that about fifty remained sitting. No wonder that, after hearing sixty-five speakers, the Fathers were weary. Yet, no wonder, on the other hand, that the minority should allege that, while it was perfectly reasonable to close a debate in this manner when the object was that of making temporal laws liable to be unmade, or re-made, a year later, it was neither reasonable nor fair, and above all, it was not agreeable to any precedent, to past professions, or to any ecclesiastical principle, to close a debate upon a dogma while yet there were prelates wanting to bear witness to the tradition of their respective Churches. According to all their theologians, dogma was not to be made by mere opinion, but by evidence of the fact that the opinion in question had been believed from the beginning. Protestants would naturally say that it was time to bury this pretence under any heap; but men whose life had been spent under the illusion of the pretence naturally felt otherwise. They had not seen that when the Church adopted the principle of tradition instead of that of Scripture, the Spouse, while professing only to supplement the word of her Lord, really entered on a course which must lead to setting it aside in favour of her own word, and that when she had adopted the principle of general consent, instead of that of clear apostolical tradition, she had set aside the principle of antiquity for that of a majority amounting to a moral whole, and that now she was only proceeding a step further in substituting the principle of a numerical majority for that of moral unanimity. But one step more remained, and that was not far off. The Spouse who had put aside the authority of her Lord to exalt her own, was to find, not only her authority, but even her consent, formally repudiated before all men by the master whom she had, in the house of her Lord, set up in His place. In that house the talk was evermore of her authority, her wisdom, her infallibility, her glory, her stores of merit and her streams of blessing, and but rarely was her Lord heard of, except as having conferred the regency on her. Now drew nigh the day when the self-asserting Spouse was, before all men whom her loud vauntings had aroused, to receive on her brow such a stigma from her self-chosen Master as has seldom in set terms been affixed to a society by its head. Meantime the blow which had just been dealt seemed fatal to all the hopes of the minority. So once more they dragged their robes down the marble way of St. Peter's with defeat behind them, but this time with annihilation close before, though not till after further strange experiences.

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