The Monothelite controversy, growing out of the assertion that Christ
had not two wills, a human and a Divine, but one Divine will only, led to the
General - Synod of Constantinople in-680. At the beginning of the controversy,
Pope Honorius I., when questioned by three Patriarchs, had spoken entirely in
favour of the heretical doctrine in letters addressed to them, and had thereby
powerfully aided the new sect. Later on, in 649, Pope Martin, with a Synod of
105 bishops from Southern and Central Italy, condemned Monothelism. But the
sentence of a Pope and a small Synod had no binding authority then, and the
Emperor Constantine found it necessary to summon a General Council to settle
the question. It was foreseen that Pope Honorius L, who had hitherto been
protected by silence, must share the fate of the other chief authors of the
heresy at this Council. He was, in fact, condemned for heresy in the most
solemn manner, and not a single voice, not even of the Papal legates who were
present, was raised in his defence. His dogmatic writings were committed to the
flames as heretical. The Popes submitted to the inevitable; they subscribed the
anathema, and themselves undertook to see that the “heretic” Honorius was
condemned in the West as well as throughout the East, and his name struck out
of the Liturgy. This one fact—that a Great Council, universally received
afterwards without hesitation throughout the Church, and presided over by Papal
legates, pronounced the dogmatic decision of a Pope heretical, and
anathematized him by name as a heretic—is a proof, clear as the sun at noonday,
that the notion of any peculiar enlightenment or inerrancy of the Popes was
then utterly unknown to the whole Church. The only resource of the defenders of
Papal Infallibility, since Torquemada and Bellarmine, has been to attack the
Acts of the Council as spurious, and maintain that they are a wholesale forgery
of the Greeks. The Jesuits clung tenaciously to this notion till the middle of
the last century. Since it has had to be abandoned, the device has been to try
and torture the words of Honorius into a sort of orthodox sense. But whatever
comes of that, nothing can alter the fact, that at the time both Councils-and
Popes were convinced of the fallibility of the Pope. (Johann Joseph Ignaz von
Döllinger (using the pen name “Janus”), The Pope
and the Council [2d ed.; London: Rivingtons, 1869], 73-75)
The new Breviary, moreover, was mutilated as well as interpolated. The
name of Pope Honorius was struck out of the lection for Leo II’s feast, in the
passage where his condemnation by the sixth Ecumenical Council had been
related, for since the Popes wanted to be infallible, this inconvenient fact
ought at least to be obliterated from the memory of the clergy. (Ibid., 397-98)
