Page:William John Sparrow-Simpson - Roman Catholic Opposition to Papal Infallibility (1909).djvu/342

 322 meaning. Moreover, the undersigned deplored that the Bishops are not ashamed to answer the conscientious outcry of their own dioceses with invectives against reason and learning. In previous centuries, when Bishops resorted to excluding a man from the Church, they did so on the ground of the novelty and untraditional character of his teaching. It was reserved for the present generation to see, what eighteen centuries have never beheld, a man condemned and excluded precisely because he clings to a doctrine which his fathers in the Church have taught him; refuses to change his faith as a cloak might be exchanged. That an unjust excommunication can only injure its inflicters—not the individual upon whom it is inflicted—is the universal teaching of the Fathers. Such excommunications are as invalid and ineffective as they are unjust. They cannot deprive the believer of the means of grace, nor a priest of his right to dispense them.

Such was the strain in which the Munich protest was written. Among the signatures which follow are those of Döllinger, Lord Acton, and Reinkens, afterwards Bishop of the Old Catholic Communion. The German Catholics, whom the Decree of Infallibility had excluded, gathered to form the Old Catholic Community.

Döllinger confesses that he had no hope whatever that under the next or one of the next Popes any important or essential change would be made for the better, since the order of the Jesuits formed the soul and sovereign of the whole Roman Church. Formerly there were counterbalancing influences: powerful religious orders, full of vitality, correcting the tendencies of the followers of Loyola. But these had become either powerless shadows, or satellites of the Jesuit dominating body.