During Vatican I, the archbishop of St. Louis, Peter Richard Kenrick (1806-1896) delivered a speech on June 3, 1870. What he said about the Immaculate Conception (which had been elevated to the position of a de fide dogma on December 8, 1854), is striking:
Theology
as a science is to be carefully distinguished from faith or the body of credenda.
It sets forth the truths of faith in systematic order, and proves them, in its
way of proving, either positively or scholastically, and deduces sundry conclusions
from truths explicitly or implicitly revealed, which, for distinction’s sake,
are called theological conclusions. These conclusions, not being immediately and
necessarily connected with revealed truths, so that the denial of them would be
deemed a denial of those truths themselves, cannot be elevated to the rank of
truths of faith, or propounded as such to the faithful at cost of their
everlasting salvation. Propositions contradictory of them may be condemned as
erroneous, but not as heretical.
In
the Vatican Council, this distinction does not seem to have been observed. The
result—a thing unknown hitherto in Councils—has been that the bishops are
divided among diverse opinions, disputing, certainly not about doctrines of
faith of which they are witnesses and custodians, but about opinions of the
schools. The council-chamber has been turned into a theological arena, the
partisans of opposite opinions, not only on this question of the infallibility
of the pope, but on other subjects, exchanging blows back and forth with the
hot temper which is more common in theologians than in bishops, and is not
becoming to either; * for all acknowledge the Roman pontiff, united with the
body of bishops, to be infallible. Here we have a doctrine of faith. But not
all acknowledge him to be infallible by himself alone; neither do all know what
is meant by that formula; for different parties offer different interpretations
of it. Here we have the opinions or views of the schools, about which (as if
fair enough) there are all sorts of mutual contradictions.
It
may be objected that by this line of argument I assail the definition of the immaculate
conception of the blessed Virgin by the bull Ineffabilis Deut; since
this opinion was for centuries freely denied by many, and was afterwards
erected into an article of faith by the bull aforesaid, with the consent and
applause of the body of bishops, as appears from their acts and writings, many
of them having been present at the pontifical definition. Speaking for myself
alone, I gave the following frank reply, which perhaps will meet the approval neither
of my friends nor of others. For a fuller reply, I refer to my Observations, in
the Synopsis, † the sum of which is as follows:
I admit that the blessed Virgin Mary through the singular favor of God, and in
view of the merits of her Son Jesus Christ, was kept in her conception from all
guilt of Adam’s sin. I do not deny that the sentiment belongs to the deposit of
faith; nevertheless, I have never been able to discover it therein, so far
as that deposit is set forth in the Scriptures and the writings of the fathers;
neither have I never found the man who could show it to me there. The
assent of “the Church Dispersed” (as it is called) proves that the definition
to which that assent is given is not in contradiction to any revealed truth;
since, as I have already remarked, the church, whether in council or dispersed,
can tolerate nothing which contradicts the faith. The pious opinion was always
cherished among the faithful—an affection which the church encouraged, and by
the institution of the Feast of the Conception, almost sanctioned. But it
never delivered it as a doctrine of faith, and popes have strictly forbidden
that the opposite opinion should be branded with the mark of heresy by its
opponents. If any one should deny that it is a doctrine of faith, I do not see
what answer could be made to him; for he would reply that the church could not
so long have tolerated an error contrary to truth divinely revealed, without
seeming either ignorant of what the deposit of faith contained or tolerant of
manifest error.
[*
Compare with the expression of Archbishop Manning’s solemn declaration as to
what did not occur—“scenes of indecent clamor and personal violence, unworthy
even in laymen, criminal in bishops of the church.” Petri Privilegium,
3.28. The coincidence of expression is curious, one bishop giving the facts as
they happened, and the other the facts as they did not happen.]
†
Synopsis Observationum, pp. 234-238
(An
Inside View of the Vatican Council, in the Speech of the Most Reverend
Archbishop Kenrick of St. Louis, ed. Leonard Woolsey Bacon [New York:
American Tract Society, 1871], 136-38)
