Letters From Rome on the CouncilDöllinger, Johann Joseph Ignaz von
History
Letters From Rome on the Council
Döllinger, Johann Joseph Ignaz von
Popes -- Infallibility; Vatican Council (1st : 1869-1870 : Basilica di San Pietro in Vaticano)
Ketteler’s pamphlet was finally published on April 18, and the Bishop has
begun to distribute it. It is really directed against the dogma itself,
which for a long time people could not believe, and not merely against the
opportuneness of defining it. How much better would it have been for the
interests of the Church, if the necessity had been recognised long ago for
looking this Medusa’s head straight in the face, and defying its
petrifying gaze, and if our Bishops had plainly and decisively announced
their resolution last December to have no dealings with it. Now at least
Cardinal Rauscher does not spare warnings; he perceives the gravity of the
danger and has had a new fly-leaf distributed, showing that the
promulgation of papal infallibility will elevate the two Bulls _Unam
Sanctam_ (of Boniface VIII.) and _Cum ex Apostolatûs officio_ (of Paul
IV.) into rules of faith for the whole Catholic world, and thus it will be
taught universally in Europe and America, henceforth, that the Pope is
absolute master in temporal affairs also, that he can order war or peace,
and that every monarch or bishop who does not submit to him or helps any
one separated from him ought to be deprived of his throne if not of his
life, besides the other wonderful doctrines in the second of these Bulls,
which must reduce every theologian to despair.(91) All that is nothing to
the majority, for whom the law of logical contradiction has no existence.
It is their watchword that the dogma conquers logic as well as history.
One of their German members gladly re-echoes the idea that the proper aim
and office of the Council is to stop the mouth of arrogant professors; if
that is accomplished everything is gained, according to this pastor of a
flock feeding on red earth. On the other hand I heard very different words
fall to-day from the mouth of another German Bishop, who said he was
constantly asking himself how long the German Bishops would look on and
put up with everything.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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