Henry Edward Manning

“ The infallibility of God is the motive of faith. And this faith, though it be not formed in us by perceiving the intrinsic credibility of what we believe, but by the veracity of God, nevertheless is a rational or intellectual act, the highest and most normal in its nature. For no act of the reason can be more in harmony with its nature than to believe the Word of God. To assure mankind that it is God who speaks, God has given to man signs and evidences of His revelation, which exclude reasonable doubt. The act of faith therefore is not a blind act, but an exercise of the highest reason. ”

“ It is to be hoped rather that the Catholic doctrine, once more solemnly confirmed by the Fathers of the Vatican Council, will be greeted by the faithful people as the rainbow of peace and the dawn of a brighter future. The object of confirming those doctrines is no other than to recall to modern society the maxims of justice and virtue, and thus to restore to the world that peace and prosperity which can only be found in the perfect keeping of the divine law. This is the firm hope of all honest men, who received with joy the announcement of the Council ”

“ It is but their old faith in an explicit formula. Among the disappointments to which our adversaries, I regret so to call them, but truth must be spoken, have doomed themselves, none is greater than this. They have laboured to believe and to make others believe that the Catholic Church is internally divided; that the Council has revealed this division; and that it is nowhere more patent than in England. It is, I know, useless to contradict this illusion. It is not founded in reason, and cannot by reason be corrected. Prejudice and passion are deaf and blind. ”

“ If a time of trial for the Church is at hand, a time of ruin and desolation to all countries in Europe will come with it. The Church may suffer, but cannot die; the dynasties and civil societies of Europe may not only suffer but be swept away. The Head of the Church, be he where he may, in Rome or in exile, free or in bondage, will be all that the Council of the Vatican has defined, supreme in jurisdiction, infallible in faith. Go where he may, the faithful throughout the world will see in him the likeness of His Divine Master, both in authority and in doctrine. ”

“ It is strange that any one should have forgotten that every General Council, from Nicæa to Trent, which has touched on the faith, has made new definitions, and that every new definition is a new dogma, and closes what was before open, and ties up more strictly the doctrines of faith. This belief, however, excited an expectation, mixed with hopes, that Rome by becoming comprehensive might become approachable, or by becoming inconsistent might become powerless over the reason and the will of men. ”

“ The prosperity of the Church and the peace of the State depend upon the close and intimate union of the two supreme powers. Who does not see then that the authority of princes not only will not receive any blow from the pontifical supremacy, but will instead find therein its strongest support? As sons of the Church, they owe obedience, respect, and protection to the authority placed on earth by God to guide princes and peoples to the last end of eternal salvation; nor can they refuse to recognise that royal power has been granted them for the defence also and guardianship of Christian society. ”

“ They, therefore, who argue against the infallibility of the Pontiff because he is an individual person, and still profess to believe the infallibility of Bishops in General Councils, and also of the Bishops dispersed throughout the world, because they are many witnesses, betray the fact that they have not as yet mastered the idea that infallibility is not of the order of nature, but is of the order of grace. In the order of nature, indeed, truth may be found rather with the many than with the individual, though in this the history of mankind would give a host of contrary examples. ”

“ In the history of the Church the Temporal Power has been suppressed, as the phrase is, over and over again. The first Napoleon suppressed it twice. The Triumvirate suppressed it in 1848. There is nothing new under the sun. The thing that has been, is the thing that shall be. We do not believe in the perpetuity of anything but the Church; nor in the finality of anything but justice. Sacrilege carries the seeds of its own dissolution. A robbery so unjust cannot endure. ”

“ We are the men; honesty and science is with us, if it will not die with us. Hand over your documents, the forged and the true; the forgeries we will find out; the true we will interpret; and by science we will prove that you have erred and led the world into error; and therefore that your claim to be a Divine tradition, and to have a Divine authority, is an imposture. The case of Honorius alone is enough. You say that Pope Leo and Pope Agatho interpreted the Councils of Constantinople so as to show, that whatever faults of infirmity were in Honorius, a doctrinal heretic he was not. ”

“ Day after day, the newspapers teemed with the achievements and orations of the opposition. The World believed that it had found its own in the heart of the Episcopate, and loved it as its own. There was nothing it might not hope for, expect, and predict. In truth, it is no wonder that a very intense interest should be excited in minds hostile to Rome by such a spectacle as the outer world then believed itself to see. And such, we may safely affirm, were the chief motives of its feverish excitement, at the opening and during the early period of the Council. ”

“ And so the Pope, although he may err by personal error in his own private judgment as a man, and as a particular doctor in his own opinion, yet as he is Pope, the successor of Peter, the Vicar of Christ in earth, the shepherd of the Universal Church, in public judgment, in deliberation and definitive sentence, he never erreth, nor never erred. For whensoever he ordaineth or determineth anything by his high bishoply authority, intending to bind Christian men to perform or believe the same, he is always governed and holpen with the grace and favour of the Holy Ghost. ”

“ It is not credible that a proposition condemned by the Church as rash should not be rash, and as scandalous should not be scandalous, or as offensive to pious ears should not be such, and the like. If the Church be infallible in faith and morals, it is not to be believed that it can err in passing these moral judgments on the ethical character of propositions. In truth, all Catholic theologians, without exception, so far as I know, teach that the Church is infallible in all such censures. ”

“ There is no tribunal to which appeal from the Church can lie. There is no co-ordinate witness, teacher, or judge, who can revise, or criticize, or test, the teaching of the Church. It is sole and alone in the world. And to it may be applied the words of St. Paul, as St. John Chrysostom has applied them: 'The spiritual man judgeth all things and he himself is judged by no one.' The Ecclesia docens, or the pastors of the Church, with their head, are a witness divinely sustained and guided to guard and to declare the faith. They were antecedent to history, and are independent of it. ”

“ Many who, with great earnestness, desired to share the blessing and the grace of extinguishing the most dangerous error which for two centuries has disturbed and divided the faithful, would have been compelled to go back to their distant sees and missions, never to return. It was obviously of the first moment that such a question should be discussed and decided, not, as we should have been told, in holes and corners, or by a handful of Bishops, or by a faction, or by a clique, but by the largest possible assembly of the Catholic Episcopate. ”

“ Many people have been partly deceived, and partly intimidated by them. The confident and compassionate tone in which certain writers have treated all who differ from them, has won the reward which often follows upon any signal audacity. But when Catholics once understand that this school among us elevates the certainty of history above the certainty of faith, and appeals from the traditional doctrine of the Church to its own historical science, their instincts will recoil from it as irreconcilable with faith. ”

“ Pray for the wants of Holy Church, especially for all who err or hesitate in their faith, that they may have the grace of a firm, decided, and living faith. Pray for the Supreme Head of the Church, the holy Father, who most likely at this very moment is more than ever before in distress and embarrassment. ”

“ I can hardly conceive a keener or more vivid motive of interest to the anti-Catholic world than this. For this cause Rome was full of correspondents, 'our own,' 'our special,' and 'our occasional.' Private persons forsook great interests and duties, to reside in Rome for the support of the 'international opposition.' A league of newspapers, fed from a common centre, diffused hope and confidence in all countries, that the science and enlightenment of the minority would save the Catholic Church from the immoderate pretensions of Rome, and the superstitious ignorance of the universal Episcopate. ”

“ Artists of surpassing skill and taste are working hard on the upholstery of the Divine manifestation, not knowing whether to think it a blasphemy or a good joke. It is their poverty and not their will that consents to the task. As we see the illuminations expiring, the Roman candles lost in smoke, and the exhibitors taking the old properties back to the vast magazines of Rome, we cannot help thinking of the poor fathers put off with glare and noise in place of conviction or peace of mind. ”

“ Indeed, 'Janus' had told the world in many tongues, long before it met, that the Council would not be free. Nevertheless, the minority persevered with heroic courage, logic which nothing could resist, and eloquence which electrified the most insensible, until a tyrannous majority, deaf to reason and incapable of argument, cut discussion short by an arbitrary exercise of power ”

“ But the visible Church is not merely a human witness. It was instituted and is guided perpetually by God Himself, and is therefore a divine witness, ordained by God as the infallible motive of credibility, and the channel of His revelation to mankind.
I need hardly point out what errors are excluded by these definitions. The whole world outside the Catholic Church is full of doctrines diametrically contrary to these truths. It is affirmed that the reason of man is so independent of God, that He cannot justly lay upon it the obligation of faith ”

“ The anti-Catholic press has eagerly encouraged this school of thought. If a Catholic can be found out of tune with authority by half a note, he is at once extolled for unequalled authority and irrefragable logic. The anti-Catholic journals are at his service, and he vents his opposition to the common opinions of the Church by writing against them anonymously. Sad as this is, it is not formidable. It has effect almost alone upon those who are not Catholic. ”

“ An extraordinary effort is to be made. Rome is to excel herself in her mimic meteors, her artistic transfigurations, her new heavens and new earths, her angelic radiance, her divine glories, and infernal horrors. If the Council has been chary of its utterances and coy in its appearances, that will be made up by explosions and spectacles of a more intelligible character. ”

“ I would ask, then, is it science, or is it passion, to reject the cumulus of evidence which surrounds the infallibility of two hundred and fifty-six pontiffs, because of the case of Honorius, even if supposed to be an insoluble difficulty? Real science would teach us that in the most certain systems there are residual phenomena which long remain as insoluble difficulties, without in the least diminishing the certainty of the system itself. ”

“ Gold may be bought too dear: but truth cannot.
Perhaps we ought not to wonder that the Protestant and anti-Catholic world should persist in declaring that Rome, by the definition of the Infallibility, has altered its relations to the world; or, as I have lately read, 'disgusted all the civil governments of Europe.' They do not know, or are willingly ignorant, that the doctrine of the Infallibility was as as much the doctrine of the Church before as after the definition. ”

“ What has here been said of the condemnation of heretical texts, is equally applicable to the censures of the Church.
The condemnation of propositions is only the condemnation of a text by fragments.
The same discernment which ascertains the orthodoxy of certain propositions, detects the heterodoxy of those which are contradictory. And in both processes that discernment is infallible. To define doctrines of faith, and to condemn the contradictions of heresy, is almost one and the same act. The infallibility of the Church in condemning heretical propositions is denied by no Catholic. ”

“ But against neither the one nor the other of these things can human histories, written by men not inspired by the Spirit of God, not seldom inspired by any other than the Spirit of God, prevail; because against the Church the gates of hell cannot prevail. The visible Church itself is Divine tradition. It is also the Divine depository, and the Divine guardian of Faith. ”

“ In the judgment of a cloud of the greatest theologians of all countries, schools, and languages, since the controversy was opened two hundred years ago, the case of Honorius has been completely solved. Nay more, it has been used with abundant evidence, drawn from the very same acts and documents, to prove the direct contrary hypothesis, namely, the infallibility of the Roman pontiffs. But into this again I shall not enter. It is enough for my present argument to affirm that inasmuch as the case of Honorius has been for centuries disputed, it is disputable. ”