Letters From Rome on the Council. Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger
to the Pope, protesting against being put into a strait-waistcoat by the regulations for the order of business, and claiming the right of proposing motions freely. They think it intolerable that every proposal, wish, or motion should have first to be examined, revised, and mutilated or changed at their pleasure by two Commissions, before it can even come on for discussion. And how are these two Commissions composed? Of course, the eight German Bishops who have already separated themselves from their countrymen, and prefer to associate with Spaniards and South Americans, hold aloof from this proceeding too. If I am correctly informed, a similar memorial has been handed in from the French Bishops; it was, at least, being circulated for signature during the last few days.
You will have received, or found in the French and English papers, the Bull of Excommunications I mentioned in my last. As I said before, it is a re-issue of the Bull In Cænâ Domini. Certain excommunications nobody paid any attention to are dropped out, as, e. g., of sovereigns and governments who levy taxes without permission of the Pope. But new censures of wide application have come into their place. In reading the Bull, one feels as if one had got into the thick of a tempest, so fierce and frequent are the lightning-flashes of the Vatican ban, darting and burning in all directions. If they were to be treated seriously, there would not be many houses in the cities of Europe that would not be struck. The Bishops are hit hard; one unpleasant surprise follows on another. While they are considering how to secure a minimum of freedom in the Council, they are suddenly overwhelmed with a hailstorm of excommunications, many of which are directly aimed at themselves, but all of which are to be administered and executed by them and their clergy. They are summoned to Rome, and hardly have they got there when this Bull of anathemas, drawn up without their knowledge or participation, and which thrusts the souls intrusted to them by thousands out of the Church, is sent to them; and the whole burden of it, with all its endless consequences and complications, is laid on their shoulders. They seem intended to drain the cup of humiliation to the dregs. The only persons pleased with the Bull, as far as I can see, are the Jesuits, who are in the very best spirits here in Rome, and see both present and future in the most rosy hues. The view of the pious Bishops is simple and unanimous: the more excommunications, so many more reserved cases and perplexed and tormented consciences. But the confessionals of the Jesuits will be doubly thronged, who are furnished with all sorts of plenary powers of absolution, and are thus made indispensable, and placed in a very superior position to the secular clergy. Moreover, the Bishops are deprived of the power of absolving from these censures. So each of these multiplied excommunications is worth its weight in gold to the Order, and helps to build Colleges and Professed Houses.
The Bull containing directions in the event of the Pope's death occurring during the Council was not issued by Pius ix. from any real anxiety to provide for such an occurrence, – for he enjoys the best health, and in all probability will falsify the old proverb, “Non numerabis annos Petri.”23 No one really supposed the Council would claim the right of electing in Conclave, as occurred once under totally different circumstances, after the deposition of a Pope (John xxiii.) at Constance. The real point of the document lies in the declaration that the Council is to be at once dissolved on the Pope's death, as a corpse from which the soul has departed. And this is a decisive intimation of the relations not only of the dead but of the living Pope to the Council. The Bull might be summed up in the words, “Without me you are nothing, and against me and my will you can do nothing.”
The opposition of German and French Bishops to the new dogma was more or less anticipated here; what was not expected was that the Orientals, numbering about sixty, and the North American Bishops, would pronounce against it. The former declare openly that no surer means could be found to throw back their Churches into schism, and place them under the holy Synod in St. Petersburg or the Patriarch in Stamboul. The Americans ask how they are to live under the free Constitutions of their Republic, and maintain their position of equality with their (Protestant) fellow-citizens, after committing themselves to the principles attested by Papal Infallibility, such as religious persecution and the coercive power of the Church, the claim of Catholicism to exclusive mastery in the State, the Pope's right to dispense from oaths, the subjection of the civil power to his supreme dominion, etc. The inevitable result would be that Catholics would be looked upon and treated as pariahs in the United States, that all religious parties would be banded together against them as common enemies, and would endeavour, as far as possible, to exclude them from public offices. One of the American Bishops lately said, “Nobody should be elected Pope who has not lived three years in the United States, and thus learnt to comprehend what is possible at this day in a freely governed Commonwealth.”
But even in the apparently compact and admirably organized mass of the 500 Infallibilists, softly whispered doubts are beginning to be heard here and there. Before the eyes of some of these devoted Prelates hovers a pale and warning ghost, called exclusion of the clergy and of Catholic instruction from the public schools. It would indeed be impossible to put more effective weapons into the hands of the powerful and increasing party who are aiming at this, than by giving its due prominence henceforth in all Catechisms to the supreme article of faith of Papal Infallibility, with some of its consequences expressed, and others left to be orally supplied by the teacher, so that boys and girls would be trained in full knowledge of the glaring contradiction between religion and the order of the State, the Church and the Constitution of their country.24 A Belgian layman here assured me yesterday that the result of the new dogma in his country would be a powerful movement against the position of the clergy in the primary schools; the gymnasia and middle schools they have lost already. One of the Belgian Bishops even is said to begin to be troubled with these apprehensions. And now a cry of distress is rising from England. The National Education League has published its programme for a system of compulsory education of the people, excluding all denominational teaching, and only allowing the Bible for religious reading. The English Bishops now in Rome, who are fanatical for the new dogma, may ask themselves if on their return home they could make a more acceptable present to the Committee of this already very powerful League than by issuing a corrected Catechism, enriched with the new article of faith. A penny edition of it would bring in hundreds of thousands of members to the League, and admirably further the design it now openly proclaims of “absorbing in a friendly way” the schools already existing.
Sixth Letter
Rome, Dec. 24, 1869.– The first part of a tolerably comprehensive document, or Schema, has been distributed, it is said, to the Bishops, “sub secreto pontificio,” and no less than seventeen parts equally comprehensive are to follow. The Schema of a dogmatic constitution contra multiplices errores ex Rationalismo derivatos Patrum examini propositum is a sort of doctrinal compendium, divided into chapters, and, as is easily seen, is only an amplification of the opening propositions of the Syllabus. In this way we shall have the unprecedented occurrence of a Papal decree, extending to the length of a book, issued with the approval of the Council. If it is received and promulgated in this shape, it will create astonishment by its wholly unconciliar form. It is thrown into a declamatory shape; it indulges in complaints and reproaches about the blindness and misery of men, who have fallen into so many deadly errors, even materialism and pantheism; it carries on its front the impress of the new Jesuit school, and seems to be inspired by the aim of bringing before the contemporary world, in their crudest form, all the hardest and most offensive principles of particular doctrinal schools, which it has hitherto been endeavoured to soften or set aside. For the originator of this tractate assures us that the aversion of men for such doctrines is only one of the poisonous fruits of Rationalism. Here is a characteristic specimen. At that Florentine Synod of 1439, which bequeathed such painful recollections both to East and West, Eugenius IV. had it defined “that the souls of those who die only in original, or in actual mortal sin, descend into hell, but are unequally punished.”25 This proposition has sadly tormented theologians, and they have devised all sorts of ways of softening or explaining it, even assuming the very doubtful authority of this Council, which was rejected by the whole Gallican Church. For even the most resolute faith recoils in horror from the logical inference, that God has created the human race in order from generation to generation to plunge into hell far the larger portion of mankind, simply because they have not received the baptism which in most
[This formula, often mistakenly supposed to occur in the Papal Coronation service, refers to the traditional length of St. Peter's pontificate – twenty-five years. No Pope has yet reigned to the end of his twenty-fifth year, and only one has entered on the beginning of it. Pius ix. completes his twenty-fourth year on June 16, 1870. – Tr.]
[This point is forcibly dwelt on by Count Daru in his memorandum, which the Pope refused to lay before the Council. – Tr.]
“Animas eorum qui in solo peccato originali, vel mortali actuali decedunt, in infernum descendere, pœnis tamen disparibus puniendas.”