Roman Catholic opposition to Papal Infallibility

Those who do not identify history with heresy will always desire to know how a Christian affirmation of the present compares with the past. Whatever validity faith may attach to...

Roman writers have differed greatly in their view of the Patristic evidence for Papal Infallibility. Some have found very little definite statement in the Fathers, upon which th...

The case of Pope Honorius naturally occupied the attention of Roman Catholics more than any other instance of papal pronouncements, because it presented peculiar difficulties to...

From the case of Honorius we may pass clean away to _the Scholastic period_, when the great systematic theologians were gathering into consolidated form the developments of the...

The development of theories of papal power may next be traced in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Pursuing the method adopted hitherto, we will endeavour to describe the...

The next crisis between papal and episcopal theories of authority is reached in the _Council of Trent_. The primary purpose of that Assembly was to reply to those without, rathe...

Nothing can better illustrate the development of thought on the papal power after the Council of Trent than the theories of Cardinal Bellarmine. A nephew of one Pope and friend...

During the seventeenth century Ultramontanism found its principal obstruction in the Church of France, its principal support in the Jesuit Society. The progress of the theory ro...

The struggle between the Sorbonne and the Jesuits was no mere struggle between a theological school and a religious community. The universities held, in the theological controve...

“He laid stress,” says a Roman writer, “on the fact that ever since the day of Pius V.’s excommunication of Elizabeth, ‘the English Catholics have been divided into two parties....

The nineteenth century found the Church of France in a desperate condition. Overthrown by the Revolution, and deprived of its possessions and its sanctuaries, many of its Royali...

The Archbishop of Paris in 1870 was Mgr. Darboy. The records of his See had been recently a series of ghastly tragedies. His immediate predecessors were Quélen, Affre, Sibour, a...

Ignatius von Döllinger became Professor at Munich in 1825. In a mixed University, where Protestant and Roman teachers addressed their students in close proximity, and Schelling...

In April 1869 Prince Hohenlohe[301] issued a circular, composed chiefly by Döllinger, to the Bavarian Legations, calling their attention to the certainty that Infallibility woul...

When Pius IX. had finally resolved on assembling a Council he proceeded without delay to the necessary preparations. These preparations may be classified as twofold: those withi...

The Council of the Vatican was opened on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (8th December 1869).[329] There was significance in the selection of the day. That very day, fift...

If the actual subject of Infallibility had not yet entered the Council for discussion, it was anxiously or eagerly debated in every mind. As far back as the beginning of the yea...

The 18th of July 1870 is from any point of view one of the most critical days in the history of the Papacy. It is the transition from old Catholicism into new. It is the consumm...

It is essential to the completeness of our exposition that we should analyse the doctrine itself which the Vatican Council decreed. The Vatican affirmation is that, under certai...

Nearly forty years have elapsed since the recognition of the Infallibility of the head of that vast Communion. The dogma was pushed through admittedly to enable authority to mee...