Catholic scholar Richard F. Costigan, a Jesuit priest, wrote the following about the Gallican Joseph-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704) and his conciliar ecclesiology:
Bosseut sees the Council of Chalcedon, with its reception of the letters of Leo I at a critical point in the debate, as illustrating the thesis. It is the consensus of pope and bishops on the doctrine that gives its “irrevocable strength,” not the authority of the popes alone, “with then no one thought of.” The fathers at Chalcedon “codecide and cojudge, and the sententia of the pope is the sententia of the council.” They studied Leo’s letter carefully and concurred in its doctrine. Their individual signatures (on the council’s decree) were not a matter of “mere obedience.” Going through the proceedings of Chalcedon, and some statements of Leo himself, Bossuet concludes that perhaps the bishops “judged, were persuaded, and understood that the faith expounded by Leo was the common faith of all of them . . . The Council of Jerusalem, as reported in Acts 15, stands for Bossuet as the model for all councils, and certain key words in that account really provide the basis for an authentic theology of the councils. In the history of the councils, he says in book 10, we find everywhere valid the apostolic dictum of Jerusalem, “visum est Spiritui sancto et nobis (Acts 15:28). This clearly joins the “it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit” with “and to us”; that is, the unity of the whole episcopal and apostolic order in teaching the faith is stipulated. This history, like the Scripture itself, certainly shows that “it is not, as they now claim, that councils have from the pope the ability to decide rightly, [they have it] from the Holy Spirit, and joined with it the authority and testimony of the universal Church.” (Richard F. Costigan, The Consensus of the Church and Papal Infallibility: A Study in the Background of Vatican I [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005], 51-52)
Elsewhere (p. 51 n. 37, Costigan notes (emphasis added):
The famous exclamation of the fathers at Chalcedon, “Peter has spoken through Leo,” received diametrically opposed readings from Roman and Gallican authors. Papalist authors say that the council gratefully and obediently assents to the papal judgment. Bossuet and other Gallican authors say that the council recognizes, after studying it, that the epistle of Leo expresses the traditional faith of the Church. Thus, they “receive it.” The consensus of modern scholarship leans towards the latter interpretation.
