Letters From Rome on the Council. Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger

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СКАЧАТЬ month is now gone by without any result, or, as many here say, simply wasted. The first real Session, on January 6, went off without any single decree being published. It has produced a very painful impression generally, that, for the obvious purpose of something to do, the unmeaning ceremony has been adopted of swearing to the profession of faith which every Prelate had already sworn to at his ordination and at other times. The question was inevitably forced on men's minds whether this profusion of superfluous swearings, in an assembly of men on whose orthodoxy no shadow of suspicion had been cast, was at all fitting or reconcilable with the Scriptural prohibition of needless oaths. But the Session had been announced, and the Opposition Bishops, contrary to expectation, had found a great deal to censure in the Schema in general and in detail, so that in four General Congregations nothing had been effected. The simplest plan would have been to defer the Session, and anywhere else that course would have been followed. But in Rome? That would have been a de facto confession of having made a mistake, and it is here a first principle that the Curia is always right. So they had 747 oaths taken, and thus the Solemn Session was held.

      It is exceedingly convenient to have to deal with a majority of 600 Prelates, who are simply your creatures, obedient to every hint, and admirably disciplined. Three hundred of them are still further bound to Pius ix. by a special tie, for they are indebted to him, as the Civiltà of January 1 reminded them, for both food and lodging, “sono da lui alloggiati e sostentati e assistiti in tutto il bisognevole alla vita.” Nor does that journal fail to point to the extreme poverty of many of the Bishops or Vicars-Apostolic, drawn hither from Asia, Africa, and Australia; even among the European Bishops it calls many “poverissimi.” Who has paid their travelling expenses, it says not. The Civiltà may be easy; none of them will swell the ranks of the Opposition, or attack the Schema, or refuse their votes and acclamations to the infallibility of their benefactor. And then the Civiltà has another powerful factor to rely upon; it says, and confirms what it says by the words used by the Pope at the Centenary, June 27, 1867, that from the tomb of St. Peter issues a secret force, which inspires the Bishops with a bold and enterprising spirit and great-hearted decisions. If I rightly understand the Civiltà, it means that for many Bishops it is a risk, and requires a lofty courage, to vote for Papal Infallibility here in Rome, while the clergy and laity of their own dioceses, excepting a few old women of either sex, never hitherto knew, or wished to know, anything of this Infallibility, and the prevalent belief has always been that the business of Bishops at a Council was only to bear witness to the faith and tradition of their Churches, not to construct new dogmas strange to the minds of their flocks. “Nous avons changé tout cela,” thinks the Roman journal, and therefore is the Council held in St. Peter's, and not in the Lateran, that the “secret force” may take full effect. Certainly there is no lack of secret forces here, They are in full activity; there is an address being hawked about, praying the Pope to take up the Infallibility question at once, and put the Council in a position to vote upon it. This time the movement originated with two German Bishops, Martin of Paderborn and Senestrey of Regensburg. Slender causes and great effects! When the pond is full, a couple of moles can produce a flood by working their way through the dam. Both of these men have become perceptibly impatient at the obstinate and rebellious disposition of their German and Austrian colleagues, and are seeking to hasten the day, when, with the new dogma in their hands, they may triumph as willing believers over the forced belief of their brethren, only converted at the last moment. The address seems to have flashed suddenly upon the world, for – so said Mermillod and the rest of the initiated – its very existence was hardly known of; and it had 500 signatures. It was not shown to Bishops of notoriously anti-Infallibilist sentiments, but no labour is spared with the doubtful, and others who have not yet declared themselves, so that it is quite possible 600 signatures may be scraped together. Papal Infallibility is here limited to cases where the Pope addresses his dogmatic decision to the whole Catholic Church.28 That was Bellarmine's view, and it would certainly offer many advantages; for all difficulties and objections drawn from the first twelve centuries of Church history would be cut off at a stroke, as it is notorious that no Pope during that entire period addressed any decree on matters of faith to the whole Church. The idea never occurred even to a Gregory vii. or Alexander iii. or Innocent iii. The two last only issued decrees at the head and in the name of General Councils. Boniface viii., in 1302, was the first who in the title addressed his Bull Unam Sanctam to the whole Christian world. This Bull therefore, which makes the Pope king of kings and sole lord in political as in religious matters, would indeed be covered with the shield of Infallibility, and we should have a firm and immoveable foundation for the policy and civil law both of the present and the future. At the same time the various hypotheses and attempted denials rendered necessary by the case of Pope Honorious would be got rid of at one blow. Only this little difficulty would remain: how it came to pass that the Popes, who only needed to prefix the word “Orbi,” or “Ecclesiæ Catholicæ,” to their decrees, in order to make them infallible and unassailable, so persistently despised this simple means, and thereby tolerated or produced so much uncertainty in the world? All their decrees before 1302, and most of them since, are addressed to particular individuals or corporations, and therefore fallible.

      The question now is, whether the minority of some 200 Prelates have spirit and harmony enough for a counter-address. On this thread the fate of the Catholic Church seems to hang. Pius ix. says, “As to Infallibility, I believed it as plain Abbé Mastai, and now, as Pope Mastai, I feel it.”29 He could therefore give us the best information, if he “feels” his infallibility, as to whether he only feels it when he signs a decree addressed to the whole Church, or also whenever his dogmatic anathemas, of which we possess such an abundance, are addressed to a single Bishop or national Church only. Meanwhile, if that large section of the Infallibilists who are fanatical get the upper hand, no distinctions will be admitted; the matter will be settled straight off by acclamation, and the Pope will be simply told, “Thou alone art always inspired by the Holy Ghost, whether speaking to all, to many, or to one, and every word of thine is for us the command of God.” Others naturally opine that the matter cannot be so easily arranged, but that the question must be taken up in good earnest and sifted to the bottom, that it may be demonstrated to the whole world that Infallibility admits of historical illustration.

      In a conversation which took place to-day between two leading men of the opposite parties, a Belgian and a Frenchman, the former said, “Je veux que l'on discute à fond tous les textes et tous les faits.” The Frenchman answered, “Je souffre de penser que le Saint Siége va être discuté et disséqué de la sorte!” That is, in truth, a serious anxiety. To begin with, no discussion among the Fathers can be dreamt of so long as the Council Hall in St. Peter's is kept to, for the speeches made there already for the most part were not understood at all, or only by very few. What is heard is waves of sound, not words and sentences. But even if at last a room better suited for human voices and ears is found, the question of Infallibility would never be submitted to a regular and really free discussion. How would the Romance majority of Spaniards and Italians, who are the slaves of the Curia but the masters of the Council, and whose whole intellectual outfit is based on the scholasticism of the seminaries – how would they receive it, if an audacious German or Frenchman were to throw the light of history and criticism on the rambling Infallibilist evidences of, e. g., a Perrone? What scenes should we witness! The offenders would be reduced to silence, not only by the throats but the feet of the majority.30 Either the discussion will be broken off, when it is begun, or it will never be allowed to begin. And therefore so many favour the plan of acclamation; and it is related how Archbishop Darboy assured the Cardinal de Luca that such an attempt would be followed by the immediate departure and protest of a number of Bishops.31

      Ninth Letter

      Rome, Jan. 9, 1870.– The Opposition has become exceedingly troublesome. The successive gradation of Roman judgments about it is noteworthy. First, it was said that the Council ran like a well-oiled machine; that all were of one mind, and only vied with each other in their devotion to the Supreme Head. Then the СКАЧАТЬ