Kitabı oku: «Letters From Rome on the Council», sayfa 20

Thirty-Eighth Letter

Rome, April 17, 1870.– It is a good sign that the minority have at length recognised the imperative necessity of grappling directly with the problem of papal infallibility, and examining in their own writings this question on which the future of the Church depends. It has been perceived now that it was an unfortunate notion to put forward only grounds of expediency, discretion, and regard for public opinion; for no answer was left when Spanish, South American, Irish, Neapolitan and Sicilian Bishops said that no such public opinion existed with them, that some were apathetic and others had long held the doctrine, which would create not the slightest difficulty or inconvenience with them, and that they were the majority.

It was high time therefore to take firmer ground, and now this has been done by Cardinals Schwarzenberg and Rauscher and Bishop Hefele, three of the most influential prelates of the Church, or rather by four, for Bishop Ketteler too has either composed or got some one to compose a work on papal infallibility.⁸⁴ But the whole edition had the ill luck to be seized in the Roman Post-office, so that not a single Bishop got a copy. The authorities seem to know that the work opposes the dogma, on which all the thoughts and plans of the Curia now hinge, although Ketteler not long ago showed himself an adherent of the doctrine, and only assailed the opportuneness of defining it.

The Univers, as the official organ of the Court, now announces the principle on which the Papal Government acts. One must distinguish, it says, between the Custom-house and Post-office. The Custom-house gives the Bishops the missives and packets addressed to them unopened, for it assumes that they will only have proper books sent them. It is different with the Post-office, which is bound not to favour the dissemination of error.⁸⁵ So the conscientiousness of the officials of the Roman Post-office is a model for the rest of the world, and it is understood that the habitual opening of letters, so far from being immoral, is an expression of the purest and most delicate morality; for might not a letter contain some error or attack on the rights of the Vicar of Christ? And how could the officials answer to God and His earthly representative for even unconsciously co-operating in the spread of such error?

As I have not seen Ketteler's publication, I can only quote the judgment of a friend who has read it and thinks it will do good service. The other three works are before me. They must all have been printed at Naples, for the Roman police has to look after the consciences not only of the Post-office secretaries and letter-carriers, but of the compositors, printers, bookbinders and booksellers. It cannot allow that any breath of error should sully the pure mirror of their souls, even though concealed under the veil of the Latin tongue; and the corroding poison becomes worse when prepared, as in this case, by Bishops and Cardinals.⁸⁶

I will speak first of Cardinal Rauscher's work, which is the most comprehensive of the three, and touches on many questions passed over in the other two. Written in a calm and dignified tone, it carefully avoids every word or phrase which could offend the Curia, and goes to the utmost length in making concessions possible for any one to accept without becoming an infallibilist; but it will nevertheless pour much oil on the flame of anger which has been blazing for weeks past, and singes now one Bishop and now another. Papal infallibility, says the Archbishop of Vienna, must extend to everything ever decided by any Pope, and the whole Christian world must hold with Boniface viii. and his Bull Unam Sanctam that the Popes have received power from Christ over the whole domain of the State. That will be welcome news to those who want to exclude the Church altogether from civil society. That the Popes themselves in the ancient Church did not hold themselves infallible, that the whole history and conduct of the ancient Church in doctrinal controversies would be an inexplicable riddle on the infallibilist hypothesis, and moreover that the Popes have often fallen into open errors rejected by the Church – all this is well established, though the author cites only some particular facts from the abundant sources he has to draw upon. He then shows the sharp antithesis between the ancient doctrine of the Church and the Popes on the relations of Church and State and the enunciations of Popes since Gregory vii. and Innocent iii. With papal infallibility the whole mediæval theory of the unlimited power of Popes to depose kings, absolve from oaths of allegiance, abrogate laws, and interfere in all civil affairs at their will, must be declared to be an immutable doctrine with which the Church stands or falls. The Christian Emperors would have treated such a doctrine as high treason, and even in the days of Charles the Great it would have excited universal astonishment. If this doctrine really had to be preached now to the Christian people, it would be a triumph for the enemies of religion, for the best men would soon be convinced of the utter impossibility of paying any regard to the precepts of the Christian religion in civil matters. The Cardinal proceeds to dwell on the forgeries by which the great master of scholastic theology, the favourite and oracle of all Jesuits and ultramontanes, Thomas Aquinas, was led to adopt the doctrine of infallibility, and how again his influence shaped the whole scholastic system and drew the great Religious Orders, who were bound by oath to maintain his teaching, to adopt it. He concludes in these weighty words: – “If the Pope is declared to be, alone and without the Episcopate, infallible in faith and morals, the Œcumenical Councils are robbed of the authority recognised by Gregory the Great, when he said he honoured them equally with the four Gospels; for they would be and would always have been, even at the time of the Nicene Council, superfluous for deciding on faith and morals. This doctrine would be a declaration of war against the innermost convictions of the Church, and she would be robbed for the future of those aids supplied by the Council of Trent at her extremest need; even the See of Rome would lose the support the Bishops then assembled gave to it, for after the close of that Council, the power of the Popes became greater than it was before.”

The remark of Cardinal Rauscher that, when the dogma of papal infallibility is defined the Church will be deprived of one of her most effective institutions, viz., General Councils, has made a great impression here, as far as I can see. It is readily understood that an assemblage of men, educated to believe in the infallibility of one master, and to repeat mechanically without examination whatever he tells them, would have no influence among men and would be universally regarded as superfluous, a mere idle pageant rather than any real support to the Church. The Church would be impoverished by the loss of one member of its organism, and that very member would be paralysed which in moments of distress and danger had most effectually protected her.

Bishop Hefele's work is worthy of the man who is beyond question the most profound historical scholar among the members of the Council. One can only regret that a writer so pre-eminently qualified to pronounce a clear and weighty opinion on the whole controversy in all its bearings should have confined himself to the single question of the condemnation of Pope Honorius. Those who wish to know the history of Honorius and the Sixth Council in 681, and to see a flagrant example of the utterly crude and unscientific poverty of that modern scholasticism which is treated as theology in the Jesuit lecture-rooms, may be recommended a brief study of this question, which has already produced so many writings and hypotheses, simple and easily understood as it is in itself. A General Council, acknowledged by the whole Church in East and West, condemned a Pope for heresy after his death, and anathematized him on account of a dogmatic letter he issued. The sentence was without contradiction accepted throughout the whole Church, the Roman Church included, and even introduced into the profession of faith to which every new Pope had to swear at his election. It was repeatedly confirmed by subsequent Councils, and in short remained in full force for centuries, till the Popes were seized with a desire to become infallible. It is only since the fifteenth and sixteenth century, and especially since the Jesuits – beginning with Bellarmine – undertook to revise history according to the requirements of their new dogmatic system, that this extremely contradictory fact had to be submitted to a process of manipulation, and the rock on which all schemes of papal infallibility seemed to be wrecked had to be got out of the way. “Si plus minusve secuerit sine fraude esto,” was said in the old Roman law which allowed a creditor to cut a pound of flesh from the body of his debtor, and so do the knives of the Jesuits and curialists cut right into the flesh of history. The Acts of the Sixth Council were said to have been corrupted through the perfidy of the Greeks, and the whole history and even the letters of Honorius to be forgeries. The Popes themselves, Rome, and the whole West had let themselves be fooled by the cunning Greeks into condemning an innocent and orthodox Pope as a heretic, and the letters of Pope Leo ii. must also be forgeries. In short these reasoners were caught in the meshes of their own net, and when in 1660 Lucas Holstein got the Roman Liber Diurnus printed – an excellent edition of which Rozière lately brought out in Paris – the whole impression was suppressed, for it contained the old form of oath which expressly attested the condemnation of Honorius. But twenty years later the book appeared to the great chagrin of Rome, and the infallibilist school had to change their front. They now turned to the letters of Honorius and tried to show that they were perfectly orthodox. But that did not touch the fact that a General Council had solemnly condemned a Pope for heresy, and that the whole Church – the Popes and the Roman Church included – had accepted the sentence without demur. Hefele has shortly and pointedly exposed the shifts and dishonesties of this long controversy carried on in more than a hundred polemical works; and he has taken care, at the same time, to establish conclusively the wide-reaching facts and general results of the inquiry. He shows (page 11), how up to the eleventh century every Pope swore to the truth that an Œcumenical Council had condemned a Pope for heresy.⁸⁷

Cardinal Schwarzenberg's work is chiefly directed against Archbishop Manning.⁸⁸ Hitherto the infallibilists, to avoid pushing their theory into sheer absurdity, had appended the condition of ex cathedrâ, which everybody could interpret more or less stringently according to his own view, and theologians had actually given twenty-five different explanations of what was required for an ex cathedrâ decision. In order to get out of this labyrinth, Manning has propounded a simpler theory. Everything according to him depends on the Pope's intention; whenever he “intends to require the assent of the whole Church,” he is infallible.⁸⁹ Schwarzenberg points out with pungent irony to what monstrous consequences this would lead. He recalls the saying of Boniface viii. that the Pope holds all rights locked up in his breast. And thus it must be assumed on Manning's theory that the Pope holds in his own mind all doctrines present and future, and draws from this internal treasure-house under divine inspiration what he wishes to reveal to the world, so that infallibility becomes inspiration. Has it occurred to the Cardinal that this is precisely the personal opinion of the very man who has now, for the sake of his own infallibility, resolved to plunge the Church into an internal conflict, of which no one can see the end?

It is then further pointed out that, if the new dogma with its consequences prevails, all Governments will put themselves in an attitude of self-defence against the Church. Bishops as well as Councils cease to be any necessary part of the magisterium of the Church, and there is no longer any need for the distinct assent of the Episcopate; the only office left them is to praise and accept with thanks every decision of the Pope's. Perhaps they may still be allowed to give their advice before he decides, but they have nothing to say to the decision itself or after it, but only to obey and promulgate the papal revelations.

Thirty-Ninth Letter

Rome, April 23, 1870.– The four chapters of the Constitutio Dogmatica de Fide bear in their ultimate shape such evident marks of the influence of the minority, and so many concessions were made in them, that there is a danger of overlooking the greatness of their defeat and their change of mind, should they finally accept the supplemental paragraph mentioned in my last letter but one. Although it was determined that the minority should make no general opposition to this paragraph, there were not a few Bishops who saw clearly enough its importance and danger. They consoled themselves at first with the promise that the suspicious passage, which clothed the Roman Congregations and the mischief they work in the Church with conciliar sanction, would not be voted upon till the still incomplete portion of the Schema de Fide came on for final settlement. And when, in spite of this promise, it was announced to be the general wish of the Commission that the voting should take place at once, the opponents were quieted by a written assurance that no new power was thereby to be given to the Roman Congregations, and nothing to be altered about them, but all to remain as of old. Gasser, Bishop of Brixen, had the courage to say, in the name of the Deputation, that the passage did not refer to heresy, though it expressly binds the Bishops to the observance of the constitutions and decrees of the Holy See, not only in regard to heresy (hæretica pravitas), but also theological errors and controversies. It is incredible that any one could be deceived by such a ruse as this, and yet it is a fact that not even forty Bishops made the omission of this paragraph a condition of their Placet. As the Opposition seemed thereby to be shrunk to less than five per cent. of the Council, the Curia was persuaded that it could get rid of them altogether by acting with spirit.

On April 18 appeared an admonition with the following passage: “It must be remembered that according to the Apostolic Brief, Multiplices inter (of Nov. 27, 1869), prescribing the method of procedure in public Sessions, no other vote can be given in them than a simple Placet or Non placet.”⁹⁰ The Fathers who had given conditional votes in Congregation had to choose now whether they would accept the chapter unconditionally or reject it “sans phrase.” It was foreseen that this alternative would disclose the weakness of the Opposition, and that those of its number who shrank from a decisive rejection would be won for the majority, for the real test of an Opposition is not in words but acts. Protests which are not answered, and speeches which are not heard, may be patiently borne with, as long as all goes well in the public voting. The Curia reckons that the minority will not now dare to show itself, and thus the unanimity will not be disturbed: and its consequent resolve might decide the whole course and upshot of the Council. If the minority gives in here, it will have suffered a first defeat, and must reconstitute itself on a new basis, by taking part in decrees carried under anathema, which are against its own convictions, it breaks with its past, accepts the responsibility and solidarity of the Council and complicity with the majority. This is to admit that all the petitions and protests it was thought necessary to present in the interests of the freedom of the Council were superfluous and aimless, and all the warnings offered of the threatened danger of its œcumenicity being questioned, etc., unmeaning. For the Council to publish anathemas implies the conviction that it is free, legitimate, and œcumenical, and that the order of business is acceptable. The minority thereby would themselves testify to everything they have hitherto assailed, and the only thing left for them would be to insist on their rights as guarded by the consensus unanimis. All other grounds for calling the Council in question would be abandoned, and it might fairly be doubted whether the Opposition would adhere to that after giving up so much; at the same time it is morally certain that the Court and the majority do not acknowledge that right.

During the General Congregation of the 19th, four Bishops, Latour d'Auvergne, Dreux-Brézé, La Bouillerie, and Mermillod, went to the Pope and requested him to have the decree on infallibility brought forward directly after the Solemn Session of the 24th. They thought rightly enough the favourable moment had come and all was now ready. Pius received the Bishops, who came as deputies of the 400, with great distinction, and replied that he would discuss the matter with the Presidents.

As it is impossible to see how the Bishops or the Governments could get rid of the regolamento when once it is fairly established, the Opposition Bishops know that they will have to approach the great question in the position they take for themselves to-morrow in the first solemn voting, and with such power, unanimity, and influence as they thereby establish their claim to. It is still open to them up to to-night to use the present moment for a complete victory. They only need declare that their protests and warnings were not idle words but seriously meant, that the incongruities which endanger the freedom of the Council and suggest doubts of its legitimacy must be got rid of before any decrees are published under threat of everlasting damnation, and that until they are listened to on this point they refuse to take part in any solemn voting.

But, as far as I know of the Opposition, the majority of them have no ear or heart for such counsel; their grand object is to avoid any decisive conflict, and so to-morrow they will simply yield, – to consider quietly afterwards their future plan of campaign! Some have thought they might save their honour and conscience by a written explanation of their vote. In the public international meeting of the Opposition these plans were rejected, but two rough drafts of the kind were proposed the day before yesterday, one by the Germans, one by the French. Both are too strong and dignified to find many supporters, and too weak to justify the Opposition in the eyes of the Christian world.

It is the sacred duty of the Bishops in Council to bear witness to the ancient doctrine of the Church, and to reform it when it has been obscured by abuses in practice and in the rule of the hierarchy. The more abuses there are, so much the more difficult, and so much the more indispensable also is this reform. What the Catholic world expects of the Council is not a fresh sanction, still less an increase, of these abuses, but the deliverance and purification of the Church from them. But to accept the paragraph which recommends obedience to the constitutions and decrees of Roman Congregations is to make the fulfilment of this serious duty, on which the fate of the Church hinges, impossible. For that paragraph will confirm and clothe with new authority decrees which are a disgrace to the Church and an injury to civilisation, wherein the confused morality of dark centuries is taught and Christian morality denied; and that too without any examination or discussion, any limitation or exception. The Bishops will thereby degrade themselves to servants of the Roman prelatura, and sink into accomplices of the Inquisition. We are told indeed that the paragraph will not touch dogma, but for ethics and practice it is almost more important than infallibility itself. It gives full play beforehand for arbitrary caprice and paves the way for the infallibilist dogma.

If we look into the future, the questions come before us of unanimity in matters of faith, and of the confirmation and acceptance of the Council throughout the Church. As to the latter, the Bishops will make it far harder for the Governments to stand by them if to-morrow they virtually repudiate their own protests. The question of unanimity remains as weighty as before, and the gross errors of the Civiltà in its attack on Strossmayer's vindication of the principle of moral unanimity in decisions on faith has greatly lightened the task of two learned Bishops, who undertook to put in a clear light the true doctrine of the Church on the subject.

If the voting of to-morrow goes altogether in the sense of the Curia, the inference will be that all the positions of the minority can be turned, and that as they are resolved to avoid any collision, they may be brought by skilful manipulation not to trouble the moral unanimity any further. Many of them console themselves with the thought that they are only sacrificing everything to peace and harmony, and are not responsible for the undertaking they have been deluded into.

The propositions of the Schema de Ecclesiâ give abundant room for manœuvring. There are many opportunities for apparent concessions and for dividing and perplexing the Opposition, and finally driving them into a corner, so that in mutual distrust of one another they may abandon all hope of making any successful resistance, and satisfy themselves that as nearly everything has been given up already it is not worth while to risk a catastrophe by taking any further step.