though of course views differed as to the conditions of re-union, according to personal position and national sentiment. Here, as well as in the Scandinavian countries, in England and in the Netherlands, a bonâ fide reformation, by making some concessions about the use of the chalice and clerical marriage, above all, by abolishing the Papal system, might have saved or restored religious unity. If the more moderate Reformers, like Melanchthon, would only recognise the primacy of the Pope as matter of human ordinance, and an institution beneficial to the Church, this was chiefly, as one sees from Luther's statements, because in their minds the notion of the primacy had become inseparably identified with its caricature in the form of an absolute monarchy, which was always held up before their eyes. Just as they could not or would not comprehend the idea of the New Testament priesthood and Eucharistic Sacrifice, because both to their minds assumed only the shape to which they had been perverted and degraded, of a domination over the laity, and a systematic traffic in masses, so was it with the primacy. It could not but be doubly hateful and intolerable to them, both on account of the then occupants of the office, and of the element of tyranny it contained, and the perception that it was precisely the Curia which was the source and origin of corruption in the Church. § XXXI.-The Theory of Infallibility formulized into a Doctrine. It was above all owing to the Italian devotion to Rome that homage was paid not only to the Papal system, but to the theory of Papal Infallibility which is its consequence. From the time of Leo x. this doctrine entered on a fresh phase of development. On the whole, during the long controversy between the Council and the Popes from 1431 till about 1450, as to their right of superiority, the question of Papal authority in matters of faith had retired into the background. At the Council of Florence, after the Greeks had summarily rejected the spurious passages of St. Cyril, the subject was not mooted again by the Papal theologians; it was understood that there was no hope of getting that claim acknowledged by the Greeks. At the Council of Basle it was openly said, as a matter of public notoriety, that the Popes, like other people, were liable to error in matters of faith. The theologians of the Papal system, like Torquemada, the Minoritic Capistrano, and the Dominican archbishop Antoninus, who defended the pet doc trine of the Curia about the superiority of Popes to Councils, between 1440 and 1470, devised another method for exempting the Pope from subjection to a Council in matters of faith, which was afterwards adopted by Cardinal Jacobazzi also. They maintained, as Torquemada expresses it, that the Pope can indeed lapse into heresy and propound false doctrine, but then he is ipso facto deposed by God himself before any sentence of the Church has been passed, so that the Church or Council cannot judge him, but can only announce the judgment of God; and thus one cannot properly say that a Pope can become heretical, since he ceases to be Pope at the moment of passing from orthodoxy to heterodoxy. On this principle they should have said that a bishop or priest never becomes heretical, and cannot be deposed for heresy, because God has already deposed him at the moment of his internal acquiescence in a false doctrine ; for if once such a Divine act of deposition were to be assumed before any human intervention, it is impossible to limit it to the case of the Pope, and to say that God is only so severe against heretical Popes, and milder towards heretical bishops and priests. A theory so obviously devised to meet a particular difficulty could satisfy 1 Summa, iv. 2, c. 16 f. 388. nobody. Meanwhile Torquemada clung to this discovery of his. He repudiates the notion that God would. not allow a Pope to define anything false. What he knew from Gratian only was enough to exclude this pretext, but then his opinion was that when the Pope acts thus he has ceased de jure to be Pope; he is therefore but the corpse of a Pope, and the Church can execute justice upon him at her good pleasure. The contemporaries of Torquemada, St. Antoninus, Archbishop of Florence, and the canonist, Antonius de Rosellis, highly as they exalted Papal authority, ascribed infallibility only to the whole Church and its representative Councils. Only in union with the Church, and when advised by it-by a Council-is the Pope, according to the former, secured from error.1 And thus there was still no Papal Infallibility. The principle was too firmly rooted that the Pope may become heretical, and then the Church or the Council must first tell him to abdicate, and, if he refuses, proceed to depose him. So Cardinal Jacobazzi has laid down.2 And he also applies the prayer of Christ to the Church, and not to the successor of Peter, as Thomas Netter or Waldensis had done before 1 Summa, Theol. P. iii. p. 416. 2 De Concilio (ed. Paris), p. 390. 3 lb. p. 421. him.1 1 Silvester de Prierio, who was then Master of the Palace, did not go beyond him.2 "The Pope does not err," he says, "when advised by a Council." Thomas of Vio or Cajetan was the first to maintain Papal Infallibility in its fulness. It was he who first got the authority of the decisions of Constance and Basle on the rights of Councils, which had been so solemnly acknowledged and attested by former Popes, assailed by Leo X., although the Council of Constance was not once named, even in the Pope's decree on the subject promulgated at his Italian Synod. It was now time to crown the edifice of the Papal system by putting into shape the principle of Infallibility, first sketched out by St. Thomas in reliance on forged testimonies, which is its natural consummation. To the decrees of the two Councils were opposed the well-known forgeries, the spurious passages and canons of Eastern Fathers and Councils. The coarsest and most palpable of these forgeries, where St. Augustine is made to identify the letters of the Popes with canonical Scripture, was utilized by Cajetan for his doctrine.3 To the fictions he had borrowed from St. Thomas, he 1 Doctrinæ, ii. 19. 2 Summa Silvestr. (Romæ, 1516), verbo "Concilium." |