As always in great movements, so with the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, much depended on commanding personalities. And no figure in the conflict of 1870 is more conspicuous than that of Archbishop Manning, It was not for his learning or intellectual depth or piety that he held so remarkable a place in promoting Ultramontane opinions. But there is no doubt that, whether outside the Council or within, he arrested universal attention. No man was more completely identified with the doctrine than he; and identified with it in its extremest form. No paradox alarmed him; he shrank from no inference, however strange. Bellarmine would have been proud of him as in many ways a worthy successor to his own à priori methods. It is impossible to mistake the temperament which produced the two famous Pastorals launched by Manning for the instruction of English Romanists in 1867 and 1869.
He has already, and this is very significant, formulated the doctrine practically in the same phrases in which it appeared in the Vatican Decree: "Declarations of the Head of the Church apart from the Episcopate are infallible."[1] "Judgments ex cathedra are, in their essence, judgments of the Pontiff apart from the episcopal body, whether congregated or dispersed."[2]
This doctrine, he is certain, the Church has always believed and taught. History awakens no doubts, creates no problems, to Manning's mind. Everywhere he contemplates, both exercised and admitted, papal inerrancy. His theory is that the stages of the doctrine have been three: simple belief, analysis, definition. In the first period, belief in the Church's and the Pope's inerrancy pervaded all the world. Thus he thinks that the condemnation of Pelagianism by Innocent I. (418)
