Page:The True Story of the Vatican Council.djvu/95

Rh to his successors in matters of faith, or, in other words, of the infallibility. On the 14th and 21st of January, 1869, the commission treated of the nature of the primacy; on the 11th of February it reached the doctrine of infallibility. Two questions were then discussed: the one, 1. "Whether the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff can be defined as an article of faith;" the other, 2. "Whether it ought to be defined as an article of faith." To the first question the whole commission unanimously answered in the affirmative; to the second all, but one only, concurred in the judgment that the subject ought not to be proposed to the Council unless it were demanded by the bishops. The words of this judgment run as follows: Sententia commissionis est, nonnisi ad postulationem episcoporum rei hujus propositionem ab Apostolica Sede faciendum esse. ("The judgment of the commission is, that this subject ought not to be proposed by the Apostolic See except at the petition of the bishops.") The one dissentient Consultor was an inopportunist The commission, therefore, never completed the chapter relating to the infallibility.

The Commission on Doctrine sat for twenty-seven months, and held fifty-six sessions, in which time it completed three, and only three, schemata. After the opening of the Council it met once only; and so its labours ended.