Chapter XIII
Solemn Confirmation of the Syllabus by the Pope before the assembled Hierarchy, and their Acquiescence, June 17, 1867.
The twenty-first anniversary of the accession of Pius IX occurred shortly before the day for which the great assembly of 1867 was convened. As the Court historian omits all mention of the Syllabus when first issued, so does he also omit to say a word of its definite confirmation by the Pontiff on June 17, 1867, and of its formal acceptance by the episcopate. We are indebted for the details in this case to an author who published before the events of 1870. Important as the transaction was, we cannot find that at the time any of the ordinary organs of the Vatican notified it to the world. Many of the learned disputants in the controversies which were soon to arise took ground which showed that they were unaware of this decisive event.
It was Archbishop Manning who related how Mass was celebrated in the Sistine Chapel, and how the Pope retired, at its close, to robe in the Pauline Chapel. Here the Cardinal Vicar, Patrizi, followed by the whole of the Sacred College and the bishops, presented an address of congratulation, concluding with hopes for many years of additional life to Pius IX, that he might behold the peace of the Church, and her triumph.
As recorded by the Archbishop, the terms employed by his Holiness in reply were of historical importance.73 It will be remarked that the watchwords, deprecated by the Pope, are not those of heretics, but of statesmen—Unity and Progress; and no Italian or German could doubt what were the unity and progress decried—
I accept your good wishes from my heart, but I remit their verification to the hands of God. We are in a moment of great crisis. If we look only to the aspect of human events, there is no hope; but we have a higher confidence. Men are intoxicated with dreams of unity and progress, but neither is possible without justice. Unity and progress based on pride and egotism are illusions. God has laid on me the duty to declare the truths on which Christian society is based, and to condemn the errors which undermine its foundations; and I have not been silent. In the Encyclical of 1864, and in what is called the Syllabus, I declared to the world the dangers which threaten society, and I condemned the falsehoods which assail its life. That act I now confirm in your presence, and I lay it again before you as the rule of your teaching. To you, venerable brethren, as bishops of the Church, I now appeal to assist me in this conflict with error. On you I rely for support. When the people of Israel wandered in the wilderness, they had a pillar of fire to guide them in the night, and a cloud to shield them from the heat by day. You are the pillar and the cloud to the people of God.
Here the bishops learned, with the full weight of pontifical authority, that the Syllabus was “the rule of their teaching.” Some explained the Syllabus as affecting discipline, and therefore liable to alteration. The Civiltá and the Slimmen had always asserted that it was purely doctrinal, and therefore above all change. In pronouncing it the “rule of teaching” the Pope settled that vital point. Some, again, had been tempted to think that the Syllabus might be laid up, like an ancestral weapon; they were undeceived, and given to know that it must be tested in war. Such were placed in the dilemma of having to offer resistance to the sovereign thus surrounded, or of having to observe a silence which must ever after carry the effect of consent. Even if they did not feel with the Pope, that the foundations of universal society were crumbling in unprecedented decay, they did keenly feel with him that the foundations of his own temporal power were crumbling. Every doubter held his peace, and the Pope’s act became virtually what, as we shall see, in a few days it became formally,—the act of the whole episcopate.
The Pope is not fortunate in quoting Scripture, often showing that he takes glosses for the text. He imagines that the “cloud by day” was not a pillar before the host, but an extended field of clouds overshadowing the wide-spread multitudes and not merely the tabernacle.
Footnotes
73 Centenary of St. Peter, p. 6.