The most effective point made against the 'opportuneness' of the
dogma of Infallibility since the beginning of the controversy, was made by "An English Catholic" in the Times of last Monday. He quoted the substance of a decree of Paul IV. made in 1559, after "mature deliberation," on the subject of the persecution of heretics. Paul IV., in the Bull ex A postulates officio, approves, and is there said to have renewed, "all and singular sentences, censures, and penalties of excommunication, suspension, interdict, deprival, as decreed or promulgated by any Pope, or person esteemed at the time to be Pope, or by any Council or decree of the Fathers, or by any Canon or Apostolieal Constitution or Ordinance, against heretics and schismatics. And he further defined and decreed that all these decrees ought (' debere ') to be perpetually observed and replaced wherever they have grown obsolete, and ever after kept in vigorous (' viridi ') and fresh observance." The laws thus solemnly not only laid down, but pronounced of perpetual obliga- tion, by a power now asserted to be morally infallible, are of the most frightfully cruel and degrading kind, not only ordering the burning alive of heretics, their branding with perpetual infamy, the confiscation of their goods, the disinheritance of their children mid grandchildren, and so forth, but encouraging members of the same family to denounce each other for heresy, and restoring favourers of heresy to their old privileges if they denounce other heretics and bring them to the stake. If Popes are morally infallible, then all these sentences were sentences passed accord- ing to the mind of "the Holy Spirit," and not by ignorant rulers of the Church in their blind struggle with a power they did not understand. Will it advance the cause of Roman.. Catholicism with heretics to be told that all these judgments were infallible? Surely not. But do not "An English Catholic's" facts go a good way beyond the inference which he wishes us to draw ? We are not very well up in our ecclesiastical history, but strongly suspect that (Ecumenical Councils and the Infallible Church itself, have seldom checked, and often abetted the persecution authorized by the infallible Popes. The hand may be the hand of "An English Catholic," but surely the voice is the voice of a modern Protestant?
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