ascribing it to the Pope, others to a General Council, or to the Bishops dispersed throughout the Church. True, schoolmen discuss some such points; but let me ask his Lordship whether he finds any Catholic who denies or doubts that a General Council, with the Pope at its head, or that the Pope himself, issuing a doctrinal decision which is received by the great body of Catholic Bishops, is secure from error? Most certainly not, and hence he may gather where all Catholics agree in lodging Infallibility."
Milner's view of Catholicism is that if we would know what is of faith, we must ask what is and ever has been the doctrine of the Church. A dogma cannot be something new. It must be what has been universally believed from the beginning. Tried by this test, he finds that the Immaculate Conception is an opinion, not a doctrine of the Church ; that individuals are free to form their own opinion concerning it, because there was nothing absolutely clear and certain about it either in the written or the unwritten word; that Papal Infallibility was a matter of scholastic discussion, a theory of theologians, but that the Infallibility of the Church was a matter which no Catholic doubted.
5. Gallitzin's rejection of Papal Infallibility is even more emphatic.
"Although I have plainly told the Protestant minister that the Infallibility of the Pope is no part of the Catholic Creed, a mere opinion of some divines, an article nowhere to be found in our professions of faith, in our creeds, in our catechisms, etc., yet the Protestant minister most ungenerously and uncandidly brings it forward, over and over again, as an article of the Catholic faith; and takes his opportunity from this forgery of his own to abuse the Catholic Church."[1]
- ↑ Gallitzin, Defence of Catholic Principles. See Papal Infallibility, by a Roman Catholic layman, 1876, p. 16.
