Meanwhile the Bishops of the minority are consulting how they shall deal with the new order of business. It was announced to the Fathers at the Session of February 22 that, in accordance with these new regulations, they must hand in all their observations on the first ten chapters of the _Schema de Ecclesiâ_ in writing within ten days.
Archbishop Spalding of Baltimore has not receded from his ludicrous notion that his Infallibilist formula is milder and more tolerable than that of the 400. He has laid it before the thirty-five French Bishops (of the minority), who have unanimously rejected it. Its essence consists, as was mentioned before, in asserting that everybody must receive with unconditional inward assent every Papal decision on every question of faith or morals or Church life. On all theological principles such faith can only be accorded in cases where all possibility of error is excluded, or, in other words, where a revealed truth is concerned; and therefore to accept this formula would be to set aside the limitation of Papal Infallibility, hitherto recognised even in Rome, to decisions pronounced _ex cathedrâ_. And thus, in the crush and confusion of the innumerable and often contradictory decisions of Popes, theology would degenerate into a lamentable caricature of a system--"science" it could no longer be termed--involved in hopeless contradictions. If the good Spalding had the slightest acquaintance with Church history, he would know that he was bound, in virtue of his inward assent paid to all Papal decrees, first of all to reject his own orders as invalid.(59)
And now I must notice more particularly what Bishop Ketteler has published against me in some German newspapers. He says that in the telegram of February 13, published in the _Allg. Zeitung_ of February 15, he has found the opportunity he had long desired for convicting the writer of the _Letters from Rome_ of building up "a whole system of lying and deceit."(60) It is "an indescribable dishonesty," a "detestable untruth," etc. His short letter bristles with such accusations. The untruths he complains of are the following:--
(1.) The telegram called the statement made by Bishop Ketteler and his ally, Bishop Melchers, a "proposal." He replies that it was only a "communication."