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140 of detraction, bear away the palm from all others. For in these not only are the dignity and full liberty of the Council assailed with the basest falsehoods, and the rights of the Holy See denied, but even the august person of our Holy Father is attacked with the gravest insults. Wherefore we, being mindful of our office, lest our silence, if longer maintained, should be perversely interpreted by men of evil will, are compelled to lift up our voice, and before you all, most reverend fathers, to protest and to declare all such things as have been uttered in the aforesaid newspapers and pamphlets to be altogether false and calumnious, whether in contempt of our Holy Father and of the Apostolic See, or to the dishonour of this Holy Synod, and on the score of its asserted want of legitimate liberty.

From the Hall of the Council, the 16th day of July 1870.

Whether history will ever record by whose hands the works here censured by name were written cannot now be said. I am glad that it does not fall to my lot to reveal them. The Council had been enveloped for eight months in a cloud of all manner of publications, from pamphlets to articles in newspapers sufficiently near to the truth to impose upon the world at large, and so far from the truth as to be calumniously false. Nobody was spared. The chief torrent of misrepresentation broke upon the august head of the Church, and fell upon all that were near to him in the measure of their nearness. Not only acts which were never done, words that were never