Page:William John Sparrow-Simpson - Roman Catholic Opposition to Papal Infallibility (1909).djvu/186

 166 such authority cannot be Divinely established. For that which may deceive us, or leave us in error, cannot be Divine. He endorsed the principle of De Maistre, that Infallibility is a necessary consequence of supremacy. One who pronounces absolute dogmatic decisions, and addresses them to all the faithful and the entire Catholic Episcopate, without requesting the consent, either direct or indirect, of the Episcopate, but rather commanding them to publish and carry out his decisions, forbidding them to infringe them, or rashly oppose them, under penalty of de facto excommunication, is personally infallible. Otherwise his dogmatic constitutions are a tyrannical usurpation of the rights of the Episcopate. And, since Dechamps does not admit the possibility of the latter alternative, he reaches quite satisfactorily his own conclusion.

Thus, to the Archbishop's mind, the Infallibility of the Holy See is an indisputable truth, based on revelation, contained in the written and traditional Word of God. It is inseparably bound up with truths which are of faith. Venturing into the department of history, the author believes that Pope Honorius miscalculated, through inability to foresee the results of his diplomatic endeavours, but committed no theological error. He insinuates a suspicion that the Greeks have falsified the Acts of the Sixth Council. They have so often done this sort of thing. During the first fourteen centuries the Infallibility of the Papal See was, according to Dechamps, never called in question. That Bishops opposed the Pope, he admits. But only those who sided with the Pope constituted the Church. The doctrine is, he assures his readers, incontestably Catholic. A man can be a heretic in the sight of God without being so in the sight of the Church. He is a heretic if he rejects a truth which he knows to be revealed