The Pope and the Council
By . Boston : Roberts Brothers.
WE cordially recommend this book to all our readers who would understand the relation which the Papacy sustains to modern thought, and the designs which have animated it in summoning the Œcumenical Council. The book is anonymous, but it is understood to represent a party in the Church who are tired of its reactionary tendencies, and who seek, with the aids of a copious erudition and a great force of reasoning, to arouse the faithful to a discernment of the downfall which the Jesuit influence is preparing for the Church by thus reducing it to rational and spiritual idiocy. Protestants chuckle with undissembled joy at the tokens of decrepitude in the Romish hierarchy, and would dislike nothing more than to see the Œcumenical Council seriously pondering the anomaly and contradiction which the Papacy presents to the life of society, or the march of God’s providence upon earth, and doing its best to soften them. But what is thus a delight to the Protestant is very grievous to the devout but enlightened Catholic; and it is well worth one’s while to read this book, if only to see how a zealous belief in the Church may coexist with an intelligent contempt for the childish superstitions into which it is now plunging. It is really very Curious that a book of this searching character should have come out of the Church itself, and should express the views of a considerable party in the Church. “ To us,” say the writers, “the Catholic Church and the Papacy are by no means convertible terms ; and therefore, while in outward communion with them, we are inwardly separated by a great gulf from those whose ideal of the Church is a universal empire spiritually, — and where it is possible physically, — ruled by a single monarch, an empire of force and oppression, where the spiritual authority is aided by the secular arm in summarily suppressing every movement it dislikes.” “ We are of opinion, first, that the Catholic Church, far from assuming a hostile and suspicious attitude towards the principles of political, intellectual, and religious freedom and independence of judgment, in so far as they are capable of a Christian interpretation, or rather are directly derived from the letter and spirit of the gospel, ought, on the contrary, to be in positive accord with them, and to exercise a constant purifying and ennobling influence on their development ; secondly, that a great and searching reformation of the Church is necessary and inevitable, however long it may be evaded.”
The book is divided into three chapters, canvassing severally the three points to which the Council will devote its attention, and which it is designed that it shall confirm, namely, the denunciatory propositions of the Syllabus, and the two new articles of faith to be imposed upon the Church : I. The assumption of the body of the Virgin into heaven; 2. The infallibility of the Pope. On the dogmatic pretensions of the Syllabus the writers have comparatively little to say, except to show that the intention is to crush out all intellectual freedom and freedom of conscience in the Church, by recourse, if possible, to the secular power; and on the bodily assumption of the Virgin, they are contemptuously brief. The main strain of the book accordingly goes to an exposure of the falsity wrapped up in the second new dogma, that of papal infallibility ; and no one can read the mass of wellordered historic information brought to bear upon this topic, without sheer amazement at the infatuation which seems to be driving the leaders of the Church to ecclesiastical suicide. The authors of the book are evidently men of great weight, and what they say must eventually command attenlion from the Church.