The bishops applauded, and the journals found the allocution divine. The Liberal Catholics, however, felt that when the Pope said, "I desire to be one with them," he meant, "I desire to see them submit to me." The grave point was, that this being the first utterance from the chair after he had been solemnly declared to be as infallible as the Church, an utterance made—if ever one could be made—in the exercise of his office as pastor of the universal Church, it contained a misstatement of fact and a misconception of doctrine. The Pope, occupied with the absentees, ventured roundly to assert that they who now opposed had been a few years ago fully of his opinion and of that of the majority. If ever a public misstatement deserved to be called by a strong short name, this one did. Had the language of the Decree, now lifted to the level of the law that changeth not, been put by a Protestant, as the doctrine of their Church, before Schwarzenberg and Rauscher, before Darboy and Dupanloup, before Strossmayer, Kenrick, Clifford, and MacHale, any day previous to the year 1870, they would have railed at the Protestant as a slanderer, and perhaps would not have let him escape without an episcopal curse. Would not Spalding have sneered at D'Aubigné as a fool and a false witness had he said that the Pope could make a dogma without either the counsel of bishops or the consent of the Church? No, the ears of the Pope were full of words of witness; the bureaux of the Council contained document after document in evidence that the statement which he now dared to make when none dared to contradict, was not true, and was known not to be true. Those bishops, in order to please the Pope, had unwisely, as they now felt, stretched the doctrine of primacy, which they did hold, till it looked to unpractised eyes very like Papal infallibility. True, they had done this in what seemed rather to be addresses of ceremony than formularies of doctrine; for whenever infallibility itself had been nakedly presented to them, even without the adjunct of ordinary jurisdiction in every diocese, and without any repudiation of the consent of the Church, they had mustered the manhood to oppose it. The Pope neither stated the facts nor discriminated between opinion and opinion. He did state as fact what was not fact, and confounded opinions that differed. Friedrich, with the acute author of the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum, and not a few others, thinks that he is personally incapable of understanding theological distinctions, and that he could not explain what the doctrine of Papal infallibility means. This seems to be impossible, and yet there is very much to prevent one from pronouncing it ridiculous. But whether he is capable of distinguishing in such a case or not is a very slight matter. The fact that remains for us is, that his first utterance from the acknowledged seat of infallibility was wholly occupied with the absent bishops, that he insinuated that they had a double conscience, and that the grounds on which he made that insinuation were incorrect in fact and inaccurate in thought. Had the question whether the Papacy was a divine organ of truth, or merely a contrivance of clever old men, liable to be overseen, like other mortals, in their words and deeds, been designedly subjected to a fair test, we can with difficulty conceive of one fairer or more conclusive, than that first utterance from the recognized seat of inerrancy. There is nothing divine in it, and the human elements do not rise above a very ordinary level.
The city was silent and chill. We can form but a faint idea of how much, in such a case, mere external impressions sway a community trained like the one of which we speak. It was as if the salvos from St. Angelo, the feeble voice of the Irreformable, had been swallowed up in the salvos of the skies, the voice of the Sole Infallible. The Giornale di Roma and the Civiltá, the Univers and the Unitá, would have spared no epithets in denouncing the man who three months before should have said that, on the night when the creative word, the fiat, Let there be light, should be uttered; on the night when the patient voice of the people and of the priests should be hushed under "the voice of God" proclaiming infallibility, a noble Roman would pen what Vitelleschi that night quietly wrote down: "The government offices, the religious establishments, and a few private houses, were illuminated; but the rest of the city remained in perfect silence and profound darkness."
The concluding words of the Roman writer, in narrating the triumph of the day, are not wholly indifferent to us in England (p. 221)—
History is bound to award to the author and originator of every work the praise or blame which is due to him. All must remember the part taken by the Fathers of the Civiltá Cattolica, and Monsignor Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, in promoting the dogma of the personal infallibility of the Pope, and all know that it was their mind and their will that carried it. On the day of the promulgation of the dogma, Monsignor Manning received as a gift from the Society of the Jesuits, a portrait of Bellarmine, with the following inscription—
Henrico Edwardo Manning,
Archiep. Westmonast.
Sodales Soc. Jesu;
Collegii Civilitatis Catholicæ,
Sessionis IV Concilii Vaticani
Mnemosynon.
It is said that the portrait was really that of St. Charles Borromeo.
One other note was often made as to this memorable day. It was the same day on which was done the deed that irrevocably sealed the fall of the Second Empire, and consequently the fall of its pendant and protégé, the Papal throne. The declaration of war was delivered in Berlin on the day following, and must have left Paris that day!
The reader having already had several specimens, and fair ones, of Ce Qui se Passe au Concile, is in a position, so far as relates to it, to form his own opinion of its "stinking calumnies," to adopt the characteristic language of the Most Eminent, Most Reverend, and Right Reverend Fathers of the Council. But as to La Dernière Heure du Concile (The last hour of the Council), we may at this point fitly give a few examples. It speaks of "Rules imposed in violation of the most manifest rights of the Council, of Commission chosen beforehand, of illusory votes, of an oppressive tutelage, of discussions without order and without aim, of modifications of the Rules as arbitrary as they were multiplied." It asserts that as to the minority public calumnies were not spared them; that their speakers were more than once forced to leave the desk without being able to explain, much less to defend their views; while the majority from the beginning took the reasons of the minority for insults, and rendered back insults for reasons; and that the petitions of the minority were not only left without effect, but without answer. It pictures the Jesuits as meeting the bishops after three centuries of feigned truce on the ground where their General Laynez, defeated at Trent, had left them; but as now coming perfectly prepared for the battle, while the bishops had not foreseen anything—
To-day it is not the episcopate that refuses to hear Father Laynez, but it is Father Laynez who, master of the field, does not even deign to listen to the episcopate, and announces to it that the question has been long decided.... The day that Pius IX said, There shall be a Council, the Company of Jesus said, I shall be the Council. We have seen three of its doctors absorb both the doctrinal power of the august assembly, and its right of initiative. The bishops have been called to sanction what the Jesuits have written, and there is the whole history of the Council.
Speaking of the Propaganda, the writer declares that it holds in its hands all the Vicars Apostolic, and most of the Oriental bishops. Taking advantage of its annual grants, it gives week by week to the prelates who are supported by them that special impulse which shapes the Council. In winter it set watch before the doors of the poor Oriental bishops and obliged them to shut their cells against brethren who came to visit them. Thus it comes to pass
that the word of two hundred Fathers of the œcumenical assembly always remains the word of the Pope alone. In fact, hitherto it is a thing unheard of that a single one of these prelates, sons of the Propaganda, should have the courage to speak before the Council or to vote otherwise than it would have them do. This single proof is of incomparable and demonstrative force, as against the reality of their freedom; for while all the other Churches, without exception, have had some independent voices, the Church which I shall call that of the Propaganda has not hitherto produced one.