Page:Petri Privilegium - Manning.djvu/464

150 oath which certain Catholics were at that time proposing to themselves and others. He says:—

'The clause which regards Papal Infallibility is a demonstration that the oath was not calculated to accommodate the bulk of Roman Catholics, since the very respectable number who believe the solemn and canonical decrees of the Pope on matters of faith to be irreformable can never conscientiously pronounce it. If the interpreters of the oath tell us that the framers of it did not intend to exclude the belief of infallibility in dogmatical decisions, we must answer them that the admission of such a tacit distinction would justly lay us open to swearing to what we do not believe. No infallibility and some infallibility will always be contradictories. The Catholic public may already know that I think the modern opinion of papal fallibility in decisions of faith to be ill grounded and dangerous, and it appears to me that the doctrine of infallibility in these matters, though not decided, might easily be proved to be that of the Catholic Church and therefore true. It must not then be renounced. The addition of personal in the address does not remove the difficulty. For if the Supreme Head of the Church be infallible in his solemn dogmatical decisions, this infallibility attaches to his person. It was promised and given to St. Peter, and it subsists in his lawful successors. It does not belong in solidum to the particular Church of Rome as an aggregate of many individuals; it does not belong to the chair or see of Rome as a thing distinct from the Pope. The distinction between the sedes and the sedens is a modern subterfuge of the Jan-