ROMAN CATHOLIC OPPOSITION TO PAPAL INFALLIBILITY ROMAN CATHOLIC OPPOSITION TO PAPAL INFALLIBILITY BY W. J. SPARROW SIMPSON CHAPLAIN OF ST MARY’S HOSPITAL, ILFORD LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 1909 PREFACE The following pages have been written to show the difficulties experienced by Roman Catholics in assenting to the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. No attempt is here made to write a complete account of the Vatican Council. Indeed, many subjects discussed in that Assembly are entirely omitted. Our interest is with one doctrine alone. What is attempted is, simply to sketch the inner history of Roman opposition to the dogma in different countries and several centuries, until and after the memorable Decree of 18th July 1870. We are simply concerned to show the process by which a very considerable section of Bishops, priests, and laity in the Roman Church were constrained to pass from one belief to its opposite. The literature of the subject is, of course, immense. A considerable part of the details here recorded have never appeared in English before. They lie buried in enormous German treatises, or in the vast official Acta of the Council; or in the documentary collections of Cecconi, Von Schulte, Friedrich, Friedberg, and many others; or in scattered pamphlets and periodicals to which access is now by no means easily obtained. The materials for a history of the opposition to the doctrine have of recent years largely increased. All the principal actors in the Vatican disputes have, by this time, passed away; and a large series of biographies have placed at our disposal private letters never published while they lived. But it will be obvious that an Ultramontane biographer of a Bishop who vehemently opposed the doctrine may be gravely perplexed between the conflicting claims of history and of edification. His loyalty to truth, his reverence for the personage of whom he writes, his regard for living authority, with its tremendous powers to revise, cancel, or condemn, his proper disinclination to scandalise the faithful by rigorous records of episcopal unbelief, or to reveal the family disunions before an incredulous world--are elements which, when they coexist, may, even in the sincerest mind possibly blend together in very various proportions. At any rate the biographies of certain great French Bishops of the Vatican struggle manifest marked reluctance and hesitation in recording fully the facts. And even when the facts have been fairly fully recorded, the English translator has--for whatever reasons--condensed them, we had almost said mutilated them, beyond recognition.