Section 15

Section 15 8 Infallibility

Francis A. Sullivan

For John Henry Newman, the difference between the infallibility of the Church and that of the pope, and between the claim of the one and the other on his act of faith, was no merely academic question. It was a very real issue that affected a great part of his life. Even as an Anglican, as we shall see, he believed that the Church enjoyed infallibility; but it was only some months after the definition by Vatican I that he could give his full assent to papal infallibility as a dogma of his faith. Our treatment of infallibility then falls into two parts, presenting first Newman’s views on the infallibility of the Church, and second his views on papal infallibility.

The infallibility of the Church

We begin with what Newman believed concerning the infallibility of the Church while still an Anglican. He expressed his mind on this most explicitly in the eighth of his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, entitled ‘The Indefectibility of the Church Catholic’.¹ The main purpose Newman had in these lectures was to describe Anglicanism – in what he saw as its most authentic tradition, if not in actuality – as the via media between the deficiencies of Protestantism and the excesses of Roman Catholicism. The defect of Protestantism was its failure to recognize the need of a visible Church equipped with a ‘prophetical office’ to safeguard the purity of the apostolic faith against the errors inevitable in the exercise of private judgement on Scripture as a sole rule of faith. The excess of Romanism was its claim to possess an abiding and pervasive infallibility that would allow it to create new dogmas practically at will.

Against Protestantism, which exalts Scripture as the sole rule of faith, Newman argued from Scripture itself, which describes the Church as ‘the pillar and ground of truth’ (1 Tim 3:15), and tells us how Christ gave to the Church pastors and teachers so that all could come to unity and not be carried about by every wind of doctrine (cf. Eph 4:11–14). He concluded from these and other passages that Scripture presents the Church as the great and special support of truth, and assures us that a divine promise has been given that the word of truth given her shall never be lost.² The following passage of his lecture shows how ‘high’ a view he had of the role of the Church as guardian and teacher of revealed truth:

Not only is the Church Catholic bound to teach the Truth, but she is ever divinely guided to teach it; her witness of the Christian faith is a matter of promise as well as of duty; her discernment of it is secured by a heavenly as well as by a human rule. She is indefectible in it, and therefore not only has authority to enforce, but is of authority in declaring it . . . The Church not only transmits the faith by human means, but has a supernatural gift for that purpose; that doctrine, which is true, considered as an historical fact, is true also because she teaches it.³

What Newman meant by ‘the Church Catholic’ here, was the ‘undivided Church’ of Christian antiquity, which he believed continued to exist, although imperfectly united, in the three ‘branches’ (Eastern, Roman, and Anglican) which had maintained the apostolic faith and apostolic succession in ministry. He distinguished between two ways in which the ‘Church Catholic’ was ‘unerring in its declarations of faith’. In antiquity, while it still enjoyed full unity, it could be described as infallible in such declarations of faith as it made in its creeds, and its conciliar definitions of the basic Trinitarian and Christological dogmas. However, when, during the course of history, the Church lost its unity, it also lost its prerogative of infallibility, and hence also its warrant to formulate new creeds or define new dogmas. But, since the apostolic faith, in its essentials, has a divine guarantee of being preserved through the ‘prophetical office’ of the Church, the Church Catholic must be indefectible in maintaining the apostolic faith. In other words, it must have a divine guarantee of remaining faithful to the essential dogmas already determined by the undivided Church of antiquity. For Newman as an Anglican, then, the true norm of faith is Scripture as interpreted by Christian antiquity.

Furthermore, he was convinced that the ‘Church Catholic is unerring in its declarations of faith’ in the sense that those Christian doctrines which all its branches teach as necessary to be believed for salvation are bound to be true, and that such agreement actually has always been had, and will always be had, but only in the essential dogmas that were already determined in Christian antiquity.

Having seen how Newman, as an Anglican, understood the indefectibility in faith which supernatural help guaranteed to the ‘Church Catholic’, we must now see what new elements entered into his understanding of the Church’s infallibility during the process that led to his becoming a Roman Catholic. In the event, it was his further study of and reflection on Christian antiquity that led him to the Catholic Church. The more deeply he came to understand the process by which the early Church rejected Arianism, Nestorianism, and Monophysitism as heresies, and hammered out the great Trinitarian and Christological dogmas of the creed, the more convinced he became that it must be God’s plan that the Christian revelation should undergo development, whereby what was at first only obscurely or implicitly contained in the deposit of faith would come to be recognized as contained therein and thus become an object of explicit faith. It was while he was spelling out the implications and consequences of this insight in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine that he reached his conviction that he must become a Roman Catholic, and that only the Catholic Church now enjoys the prerogative of infallibility. At the risk of over-simplification, I would summarize the process of his thought in the following way.

If the truths that are arrived at by a process of legitimate development of doctrine are really implicitly contained in the original revelation, it follows that they are really part of that revelation. Then Divine Providence, which safeguards the original revelation from being corrupted in its transmission in the faith of the Church, must also preserve the Church from error in its acceptance of such developments as articles of its faith. Such developments were already taking place in the ancient Church, as we see in the definition of the Trinitarian and Christological dogmas, and in the writings of the Fathers, who both prepared and subsequently defended and explained the conciliar decisions. If such development can rightly be seen as part of God’s plan for the Church, there is no reason to restrict such development to a limited period of history. Actually such development has continued in the Roman Catholic Church, and the doctrines that are the fruit of such development can be shown to be homogeneous with the faith of Christian antiquity, and none can be shown to be a corruption of it. Of the three branches of what Anglicans call the Church Catholic, only the Roman Catholic Church truly corresponds to the Church of the first centuries; it is the only one that can invoke St Augustine’s dictum: Securus judicat orbis terrarum. What the whole Roman Catholic Church believes and teaches as an article of apostolic faith must then be truly contained in the original revelation; indeed this Church must be infallible in its profession of faith and in the solemn definitions by which its teaching body proposes doctrines to be professed as articles of faith.

In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Newman describes the powerful impact the phrase Securus judicat orbis terrarum had upon him, and the role it played in the process of his conversion, comparing it with the tolle lege, tolle lege of St Augustine’s Confessions.⁴ As a Catholic, Newman came back to this dictum again and again, insisting that the orbis terrarum could only be identified with the Roman Catholic Church, since this was the only Christian body that was both spread over the whole world and at the same time united in faith and communion. The meaning of securus judicat, as he explained it, was ‘that the deliberate judgement, in which the whole Church at length rests and acquiesces, is an infallible prescription, and a final sentence against such portions of it as protest and secede’.⁵ He could put the same idea either negatively: ‘What is not taught universally, what is not believed universally, has no claim on me’,⁶ or positively: ‘As to faith, my great principle was: “Securus judicat orbis terrarium”’.⁷ ‘What bishops and people say all over the earth, that is the truth.’⁸ He spoke of a ‘passive infallibility’ of the Catholic people, explaining this to mean that ‘the body of the faithful can never misunderstand what the Church determines by the gift of active infallibility’.⁹

While Newman was convinced that the infallibility of the Church could only be understood as a supernatural gift, he also insisted that it did not involve a positive gift of inspiration, but that it was rather negative in character. In a letter to a friend, written almost a year after Vatican I, he explained how he conceived this negative aspect of infallibility:

I have always thought, and think still, that the infallibility of the Church is an inference (a necessary inference) from her prerogative that she is the divinely appointed Teacher of her children and of the world. She cannot fulfil this office without divine help – that is, she never can be permitted to go wrong in the truths of revelation – This is a negative proposition – the very idea of infallibility is a negative. She teaches by human means, she ascertains the truth by human means – of course assisted by grace, but so is every inquirer, and she has in kind no promise of invincible grace, which a Father or a divine, or an inquirer has not – but she has this security, that, in order to fulfil her office, her out come is always true in the matter of revelation. She is not inspired – the word has sometimes been used, and in Councils especially, – but, properly speaking, inspiration is positive, and infallibility is negative; and a definition may be absolute truth, though the grounds suggested for it in the definition, the texts, the patristic authorities, the historical passages, are all mistakes.¹⁰

Precisely because infallibility is not inspiration, Newman insisted that it did not dispense the pope or bishops from the task of consultation and deliberation when they undertook the weighty responsibility of defining a dogma of faith. The preparatory work of the schola theologorum had an indispensable role to play in the process leading up to making final decisions on matters of faith. Nor could those enjoying the supernatural help assured to the Church’s official teachers neglect the gift of reason possessed perhaps in extraordinary measure by individuals who did not share the bishops’ gifts. From his intimate knowledge of the history of the early councils, Newman could affirm that, ‘Ecumenical Councils . . . have been guided in their decisions by the commanding genius of individuals, sometimes young and of inferior rank’.¹¹

Newman on papal infallibility before Vatican I

After he became a Catholic, the infallibility of the Catholic Church was for Newman a matter of the most absolute certitude. Strikingly different from this had been his state of mind about the infallibility of the pope. Even when the Vatican Council had defined this doctrine, he was not yet convinced that he must accept it with an assent of faith, since the council’s final vote on this issue had lacked the moral unanimity he believed necessary for a conciliar definition. He arrived at certitude about papal infallibility only some months after the adjournment of the Vatican Council, when it had become clear that the Catholic Church accepted this as a dogma of its faith. In other words, it was his certitude about the infallibility of the Church that brought him to certitude about papal infallibility. How, then, did Newman describe his state of mind about the doctrine of papal infallibility during the previous twenty-five years since he became a Catholic? He answered this question quite often in his letters. The following are some examples of the way he expressed his mind about this between 1866 and 1868. ‘I have ever thought it likely to be true, never thought it was certain.’¹² ‘On the whole, then, I hold it, but I should account it no sin if, on grounds of reason, I doubted it.’¹³ ‘I hold the Pope’s Infallibility, not as a dogma, but as a theological opinion; that is, not as a certainty, but as a probability.’¹⁴ ‘I have only an opinion (not faith) that the Pope is infallible.’¹⁵

Two questions arise, then. What were the reasons that led him to hold it as a theological opinion? Why did he not find them sufficient grounds for certitude? The following are some of the reasons that he gave, mostly in his private correspondence, to explain why he had held papal infallibility as a theological opinion. ‘I think there is a good deal of evidence, on the very surface of history and the Fathers, in its favour.’¹⁶ ‘The fact that all along for so many centuries, the head of the Church and the teacher of the faithful and the Vicar of Christ has been allowed by God to assert virtually his infallibility, is a great argument in favour of the validity of his claim.’¹⁷ ‘I consider the self-assertion, the ipse dixit of the Popes for 1800 years, a great and imposing argument for the validity of their claims.’¹⁸ ‘The Popes acted as if they were infallible in doctrine with a very high hand, peremptorily, magisterially, fiercely . . . They acted in a way that needed infallibility as its explanation.’¹⁹

It is this argument from the historical exercise of papal doctrinal authority that Newman consistently offered when he set out to explain why he had held papal infallibility as a theological opinion ever since he became a Catholic. It is obvious that he did not judge this argument sufficiently cogent to warrant an assent of certitude. There can be no doubt about Newman’s familiarity with the arguments that Perrone and other Catholic theologians had offered in favour of papal infallibility. In fact, there are some references to such arguments in his letters and private notes, which, while brief and sometimes enigmatic, do suggest that he did not find them adequate to form the kind of convergence of probabilities that he required for certitude.

On the other hand, neither was he convinced by the arguments brought against papal infallibility by Döllinger and others, who claimed that it was contradicted by the serious doctrinal errors that various popes, such as Honorius, had made in their official pronouncements. In commenting on a pamphlet published in 1868 with the title ‘The Condemnation of Pope Honorius’, Newman wrote to its author, Peter Le Page Renouf: ‘I certainly did not know how strong a case could be made out against Pope Honorius. But with all its power, I do not find it seriously interferes with my own view of Papal Infallibility . . . You have brought out a grave difficulty in the way of the doctrine; that is, you have diminished its probability, but you have only diminished it. To my mind the balance of probabilities is still in favour of it.’²⁰

Even though, during all this period, papal infallibility was not a matter of personal faith for Newman, he could say honestly that he ‘held’ it, and he did not hesitate to present it as Catholic doctrine and defend it against Protestant misrepresentations. On the other hand, he was strongly opposed to the effort being made by Archbishop Manning and others to have the Vatican Council define papal infallibility as a dogma of Catholic faith. One reason for this was his belief that for the council to declare that all Catholics were obliged to give this doctrine their assent of faith would place too heavy a burden on the faith of many Catholics, and especially of recent converts from Anglicanism. He argued that past councils had defined only such dogmas as were necessary to avert grave dangers to the faith, and that there was no such necessity to define papal infallibility.

The other reason was his fear that Archbishop Manning and his friends would succeed in having the council define papal infallibility in terms that would confirm the interpretation of this doctrine that William G. Ward had been propagating in his journal, Dublin Review. Newman had reason to believe that Manning and other bishops who were pressing for this definition understood the doctrine much as Ward did. Newman had two main objections to Ward’s understanding of papal infallibility. It would allow the pope to define doctrines that were neither revealed nor necessary for the defence of revealed truth, and it would attribute infallibility to papal decrees lacking the solemnity of dogmatic definitions ex cathedra. Newman was convinced that Ward’s interpretation of papal infallibility was excessive both with regard to the matters about which the pope could speak infallibly, and with regard to the kind of papal statements that ought to be recognized as infallible.

However, he did not publish his objections to Ward’s position because he chose not to enter publicly into controversy with his fellow Catholics on questions concerning papal infallibility. The reason was that at that time there was no one answer being given by Catholic authors to several of these questions, and if Newman put forward his own opinion, he would have had either to criticize or to ignore opinions held by other Catholics. It was for this reason also that he decided not to publish the second part of his reply to Edward Pusey’s Eirenicon, in which he would have answered Pusey’s objections to the doctrine of papal infallibility. As he put it in his notes: ‘I should not be writing against Pusey, but making a case against Ward, and every one would say so’.²¹

However, for a time he did contemplate writing a second reply to Pusey on the question of infallibility, and with that in view he compiled a fairly extensive volume of notes, which were first published in 1979.²² In what follows, I shall rely on those notes to explain on what grounds Newman judged Ward’s position on both of those issues to be excessive, and how he justified his own position.

Newman was convinced that the Church had the supernatural help that guaranteed her infallibility only with regard to the divine revelation that had been entrusted to her. As a Catholic, he recognized legitimate developments as belonging to the deposit of revelation. The gift of infallibility guaranteed that the Church would define as dogma only such developments as were legitimate. In addition to such developments, he also recognized certain kinds of ‘dogmatic facts’ as belonging to revelation, and hence as possible matters for infallible decision, provided that they were merely ‘concrete expressions’ or ‘concrete exhibitions’ of what was revealed. For example, in order effectively to reject the heresy of Jansenism, the Church had to be able to say definitively whether certain of the writings of Jansenius were heretical or not. The Church would not be able to speak infallibly at all if it could not determine with infallibility whether particular expressions were orthodox or heretical; this was merely the ‘concrete exhibition’ of the revealed truth. Questions of morality also belonged within the scope of infallibility; here Newman insisted that this does not apply to mere precepts, but only to ‘general categorical enunciations’ of moral doctrine; and only to such doctrine as is based on divine law and has to do with things necessary for salvation.²³

Newman also recognized that, in order to be able to safeguard revelation itself, the Church needed to be able to speak with infallibility about certain matters which, while not in themselves revealed, were necessarily connected with revelation. Of these he used the Latin word pomoeria, which literally referred to the boundary zone which the ancient Romans left free of buildings inside and outside their city walls. Modern theologians generally speak of such matters as constituting a ‘secondary object’ of infallibility. With regard to such a ‘boundary zone’ of the subject-matter for infallible teaching, Newman’s basic principle was: ‘No declaration or proposition of the church is infallible except those which relate to the res revelata’.²⁴ But he saw that some propositions that were not in themselves part of the res revelata could be variously related to it. He distinguished between two kinds of such propositions, in the following way:

Though the Church cannot increase the depositum fidei, there are two ways in which it can make positive enunciations beyond it (viz. by stating the relations of other propositions to it). In the first place, it can affirm that certain propositions are injurious to it. It does not affirm or deny their predicates of their subjects – but it affirms that the propositions, as they stand, are inconsistent with or injurious to the depositum. That is, it can condemn propositions.

And next she can enunciate that certain other propositions are more or less connected with or congenial to the depositum; necessarily connected, or probably so, or morally, and therefore absolutely true, or certain, or probable, as the case may be.²⁵

In all of this question concerning the limits of infallibility, what most deeply concerned Newman during the years leading up to the Vatican Council was the way that Ward was extending those limits so as to include matters that were neither revealed nor necessarily connected with revelation. Ward’s line of argument ran as follows. Whenever the pope speaks with his authority as supreme teacher in the Church, he speaks infallibly. Since he exercises this teaching authority in his bulls, encyclicals, and allocutions, he also speaks with infallibility in such pronouncements. Therefore, whatever is the subject-matter of such authoritative statements is also the subject-matter of infallibility. It does not have to be contained in or necessarily related to the deposit of faith; all we have to know is that the pope has spoken with his supreme authority, and therefore with infallibility about it.

Newman vigorously rejected Ward’s idea that whenever, and about whatever matter, the pope spoke with his authority as supreme teacher in the Church, he also spoke with infallibility. He came back again and again to this question in the theological notes that he wrote between 1865 and 1867. As we know, Newman did not want to enter into public controversy with Ward, but he did give his advice and encouragement to a younger priest of the Oratory, Fr Ignatius Ryder, who in 1867 published a work critical of Ward’s extravagant views.²⁶ Some of the notes we are referring to were written for Ryder’s use in his controversy with Ward. However, in the earlier part of the notes (which are all dated), Newman described the opinion which he objected to, without mentioning the names of its proponents. He said: ‘Some have thought that the authoritative tone and wording of the Bulls and Briefs showed that they were infallible enunciations – but I cannot admit this argument at all’.²⁷

Later on, in the notes which he wrote for Ryder’s use, he was referring explicitly to Ward when he said: ‘In other words, he does not allow that the Church can speak solemnly without speaking with her infallible voice. This then is the main proposition to which I shall direct my attention – viz., to show that there is a department of teaching, in which the Church speaks, authoritatively indeed, but not infallibly.’²⁸ In further notes for Ryder, Newman says that he has no objection to Ward’s holding the infallibility of encyclicals as his own private opinion, but he insists that Ward cannot declare this to be a matter of obligation for all Catholics, as he was in fact doing, unless he can prove it to be so; and he cannot prove it from the consensus of theologians, since it is an opinion that was ‘unheard of till late centuries . . . We can trace the authors in whose writings it arose, etc. etc. It is not generally received now.’²⁹ Many references in these notes show that Newman’s understanding of the limits of papal infallibility was shared by such respected Catholic theologians as Giovanni Perrone of the Roman College.

Papal infallibility as defined dogma

Newman’s reaction, when he saw the decree defining papal infallibility as a dogma of faith, was one of relief at its contents, even though he was not pleased that it had been defined, nor was he yet convinced that it had the force of a conciliar definition, since it had not been approved by the bishops with the moral unanimity he believed to be required. However, as far as the wording of the decree was concerned, he was satisfied that it imposed no more on him that what he had already held. While he refrained from publishing his views on the Vatican dogma for several years after it had been defined, he did express his mind freely in his private letters to friends. The following are some of the comments he made to them.

‘I saw the new Definition yesterday, and am pleased at its moderation, that is, if the doctrine in question is to be defined at all. The terms used are vague and comprehensive, and, personally, I have no difficulty in admitting it.’³⁰ ‘The definition is what the Church has acted on for some centuries, and a very large body of Catholics have long held.’³¹ ‘You must not fancy that any very stringent definition has passed – on the contrary it is very mild in its tenor, and has been acted on by the Pope at least for the last 300 years.’³² ‘I agree with you that the wording of the Dogma has nothing very difficult in it. It expresses what, as an opinion, I have ever held myself with a host of other Catholics.’³³ ‘Very little has been passed indeed – and they know this, and are disappointed who have been the means of passing it – but they use big words just now to conceal their disappointment, and they hope by speaking big and breaking down opposition, to open the way to passing something more. From what I heard at Rome, while the matter was going on, from almost the first authority, they hoped to get a decree which would cover the Syllabus, and they have not got it. They have only got authoritatively pronounced that which Fr Ryder maintained against Mr Ward.’³⁴ ‘As to your friend’s question, certainly the Pope is not infallible beyond the Deposit of Faith originally given – though there is a party of Catholics who, I suppose to frighten away converts, wish to make out that he is giving forth infallible utterances every day . . . I have no hesitation in saying that, to all appearances, Pius IX wished to say a great deal more (that is, that the Council should say a great deal more) than it did, but a greater Power hindered it.’³⁵

As the foregoing quotations attest, Newman was confident that the dogma as defined by the council could be correctly interpreted to put the limits on the exercise and the subject-matter of papal infallibility which he had been describing in his private notes. However, as some of his personal remarks also show, he knew that others (no doubt he had Ward and Manning in mind) had not abandoned their ‘maximizing’ views. Newman’s concern in this regard was confirmed when Archbishop Manning on 13 October 1870 published a pastoral letter setting forth his interpretation of the Vatican decrees.³⁶ The passage in it that most disturbed Newman was the following:

In like manner all censures, whether for heresy or with a note less than heresy, are doctrinal definitions in faith and morals, and are included in the words in doctrina de fide vel moribus definienda. In a word, the whole magisterium or doctrinal authority of the Pontiff as the supreme Doctor of all Christians is included in this definition of his infallibility. And also all legislative or judicial acts, so far as they are inseparably connected with his doctrinal authority; as, for instance, all judgments, sentences, and decisions, which contain the motives of such acts as derived from faith and morals. Under this will come laws of discipline, canonisation of Saints, approbation of religious Orders, of devotions, and the like; all of which intrinsically contain the truths and principles of faith, morals, and piety.

The Definition, then, limits the infallibility of the Pontiff to his supreme acts ex cathedra in faith and morals, but extends his infallibility to all acts in the fullest exercise of his supreme magisterium or doctrinal authority.³⁷

While this final sentence, if standing alone, would be susceptible of a moderate interpretation, in its context it can only mean that all the instances mentioned in the previous paragraph must be taken to be examples of the ‘supreme acts ex cathedra’ in which the pontiff exercises his infallibility. And this was put forward not as a theological opinion, but as the meaning of a dogma to which Catholics were obliged to give their assent of faith.

About a month after this pastoral appeared, Newman received a letter from a prominent member of Manning’s archdiocese, Lady Simeon, who spoke of her distress at the contents of her archbishop’s pastoral letter. Newman’s reply contained the following very frank remarks on that subject:

The Archbishop only does what he has done all along – he ever has exaggerated things, and ever has acted towards individuals in a way which they felt to be unfeeling . . . And now, as I think most cruelly, he is fearfully exaggerating what has been done at the Council. The Pope is not infallible in such things as you instance. I enclose a letter of our own Bishop, which I think will show you this . . . Therefore, I say confidently, you may dismiss all such exaggerations from your mind, though it is a cruel penance to know that the Bishop where you are, puts them forth. It is an enormous tyranny.³⁸

Although Newman expressed his mind so freely in private correspondence, he remained firm in his resolve not to enter into public controversy with Catholics, least of all with the Archbishop of Westminster. For the next four years he busied himself with other projects, such as preparing new editions of previous works. But in November 1874 a challenge presented itself that he felt he could not ignore, in the form of a pamphlet by the Prime Minister William Gladstone, entitled ‘The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation’. Newman judged Gladstone’s attack on the civil allegiance and personal freedom of Catholics to be based on a gross ‘maximizing’ of the meaning and consequences of the Vatican definition of papal infallibility. Thus Newman saw a golden opportunity presented him not only to defend his fellow Catholics against Gladstone’s charges, but to put forth and to justify a moderate interpretation of the Vatican dogma, thus indirectly refuting Ward and Manning at the same time.

Towards the end of 1874, Newman had reason for added confidence that his ‘minimizing’ was legitimate, because during that year he had come to know of a work written by Bishop Joseph Fessler, entitled The True and the False Infallibility of the Popes: A Controversial Reply to Dr Schulte.³⁹ Schulte belonged to the ‘Old Catholics’ who rejected the Vatican dogmas; Fessler had been the Secretary-General of Vatican I, and had voted with the majority for the decree; but in answering Schulte had given a very moderate interpretation of papal infallibility. He had sent a copy of his work to Pius IX, who had it translated into Italian, read it, and wrote to Bishop Fessler giving it his full approval. Newman set his close friend Ambrose St John to work preparing an English translation, which he was able to use while writing his reply to Gladstone; at the same time he had the use of a French translation published in 1873.⁴⁰ Thus, at the very outset of chapter 9 of his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, in which he gave his interpretation of the Vatican decree, he was able to appeal to Bishop Fessler’s work in support of his own lifelong conviction that ‘a moderation of doctrine, dictated by charity, is not inconsistent with soundness in the faith’.⁴¹

The twenty pages of Newman’s chapter on ‘The Vatican Definition’ present his ‘wise and cautious theology’⁴² of infallibility. There is no need to go into detail here about the contents of this chapter of his reply to Gladstone, since it presents the same moderate understanding of papal infallibility that Newman had spelled out in his private notes against Ward. Newman himself declared, when he had seen the wording of the Vatican decree: ‘It expresses what, as an opinion, I have ever held myself with a host of other Catholics’.⁴³ If the present article has made a contribution to the study of Newman’s thought on infallibility, it will be to have demonstrated the truth of the statement we have just quoted, by illustrating, from his previous writings, and largely from his private letters and notes, that his interpretation of the Vatican dogma in 1874 was in fact what he had always believed with unshakeable faith about the infallibility of the Church, and what as a Catholic he had held as a personal opinion, even before the Vatican Council, about the nature and limits of papal infallibility.

Notes

1. V.M., i:189–213.

2. V.M., i:193.

3. V.M., i:190.

4. Apo., 110.

5. Apo., 110.

6. L.D., xxiii:275.

7. L.D., xxiii:275.

8. L.D., xxv:235.

9. L.D., xxvii:338.

10. L.D., xxv:309.

11. Apo., 237–8.

12. L.D., xxiii:157.

13. L.D., xxiii:105.

14. L.D., xxiv:92.

15. L.D., xxiii:275.

16. L.D., xxiii:105.

17. L.D., xxv:168.

18. L.D., xxv:186.

19. L.D., xxv:299.

20. T.P., ii:112.

21. T.P., ii:112.

22. T.P., ii:99–160.

23. L.D., xxvii:214; see also Diff., ii:331.

24. T.P., ii:115.

25. T.P., ii:142.

26. H. I. D. Ryder, Idealism in Theology (London, 1867).

27. T.P., ii:118.

28. T.P., ii:147.

29. T.P., ii:149–50.

30. L.D., xxv:164.

31. L.D., xxv:170.

32. L.D., xxv:173.

33. L.D., xxv:174–5.

34. L.D., xxv:224. Newman referred to the Syllabus of Errors, a list of propositions that Pius IX had condemned in his encyclicals, allocutions, etc., over a period of almost twenty years. This list was attached to his encyclical Quanta cura of 1864.

35. L.D., xxv:297, 299.

36. Archbishop Manning, The Vatican Council and its Definitions: A Pastoral Letter to the Clergy (London, 1870). This was subsequently published, together with two previous pastoral letters by Manning, in one volume with the title Petri Privilegium (London, 1871).

37. Manning, Vatican Council, 89–90.

38. L.D., xxiv:230. The ‘letter of our own Bishop’ to which Newman refers is probably the letter of Bishop Ullathorne of Birmingham that was published in the Birmingham Daily Post of 14 November 1870.

39. English translation from the German by A. St John (London, 1875).

40. Joseph Fessler, La Vraie et la Fausse Infaillibilité des papes, trans. and intro. E. Cosquin (Paris, 1873).

41. Diff., ii:321.

42. Diff., ii:332.

43. L.D., xxv:174–5.

Section 15

8 Infallibility

The infallibility of the Church

Newman on papal infallibility before Vatican I

Papal infallibility as defined dogma

Further reading