Page:William John Sparrow-Simpson - Roman Catholic Opposition to Papal Infallibility (1909).djvu/166

 146 he is personally most strongly attached. He deplores from the depth of his heart that the Popes ever asserted the opposite principle. Their pretensions have been disastrous to the Catholic Church, and particularly so to the Holy See. But his reason for not discussing the subject is that the Gallican principle finds hardly any opponents even in Italy. Since Italian writers do not attack it there is no need to defend.

But on the question of Papal Infallibility he feels constrained to express his strong adhesion to the Gallican doctrine. The partisans of Infallibility affirm that when the Pope, taking the necessary precautions, speaks officially, he is infallible, and his decisions are unalterable laws for all the Church. That is the Ultramontane opinion. We, on the contrary, says Cardinal Luzerne, do not believe the Holy Father to be infallible. We believe that when he acts as Pope his decisions ought to be respected; but his dogmatic decrees, however worthy of regard, are not infallible, and only exact an outward submission, but not an inward assent until they are endorsed by the acceptance of the Universal Church. Papal decisions have weight—some more, some less. They are not equal in authority, and none of them are infallible. The Ultramontane system, that the Pope is infallible when he speaks officially, sins against the truth in the essential point of novelty. Gallicanism, if it had a political side, was essentially ecclesiastical and spiritual. Its political interest was to protect the rights and claims of a national Church. It regarded the Church of each people as a definite entity, although of course merged in the unity of the Universal Church. But this was not the fundamental principle of the Gallican idea. The heart and centre of their contention lay in the rights of the