I will not pass from
this question of History without a word about Pope Honorius, whose condemnation
by anathema in the Sixth Ecumenical Council, is certainly a strong primâ
facie argument against the Pope’s doctrinal infallibility. His case is
this:--Sergius, Patriarch of Constantinople, favoured, or rather did not
condemn, a doctrine concerning Our Lord’s Person which afterwards the Sixth
Council pronounced to be heresy. He consulted Pope Honorius upon the subject,
who in two formal letters declared his entire concurrence with Sergius’s
opinion. Honorius died in peace, but, more than forty years after him, the
Sixth Ecumenical Council was held, which condemned him as a heretic on the
score of those two letters. The simple question is, whether the heretical documents
proceeded from him as an infallible authority or as a private Bishop. Now I
observe that, whereas the Vatican Council has determined that the Pope is
infallible only when he speaks ex cathedrâ, and that, in order to speak ex
cathedrâ, he must at least speak ‘as exercising the office of Pastor and
Doctrine of all Christians, defining, by virtue of his Apostolic authority, a
doctrine whether of faith or of morals for the acceptance of the universal Church’
. . . from this Pontifical and dogmatic explanation of the phrase it follows,
that, whatever Honorius said to Sergius, and whatever he held, his words were
not ex cathedrâ, and therefore did not proceed from his infallibility. I
say so first, because he could not fulfil the above conditions of an ex
cathedrâ utterance, if he did not actually mean to fulfil them . . .
The Pope cannot address his people East and West, North and South, without meaning
it, as if his very voice, the sounds from his lips, could literally be heard
from pole to pole; nor can he exert his ‘Apostolic authority’ without knowing
he is doing so; nor can he draw upon a form of words and use care and make an
effort in doing so accurately, without intention to do so; and, therefore, no
words of Honorius proceeded from his prerogative of infallible teaching, which
were not accompanied with the intention of exercising that prerogative; and who
will dream of saying, be he Anglican, Protestant, unbeliever, or on the other
hand Catholic, that Honorius on the occasion in question did actually intend to
exert that infallible teaching voice which is heard do distinctly in the Quantâ
Curâ and the Pastor Aeternus? . . . Secondly, it is no part of our
doctrine, as I shall say in my next section, that the discussions previous to a
Council’s definition, or to an ex cathedrâ utterance of a Pope, are
infallible, and these letters of Honorius by the Council in no sense
compromises the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. At the utmost it only decides
that Honorius in his own person was a heretic, which is inconsistent with no
Catholic doctrine; but we may rather hope and believe that the anathema fell,
not upon him, but upon his letters in their objective sense, he not intending
personally what his letters legitimately expressed. (John Henry Newman, Letter
to Duke of Norfolk, ch. 8, 1875, as quoted in Dave Armstrong, The Quotable
Newman: A Definitive Guide to His Central Thoughts and Ideas [Manchester,
N.H.: Sophia Institute Press, 2012], 187-88)
