Catholicity is already condemned. If yes, they are preparing for themselves an act of faith and obedience scarcely reasonable. For they now affirm that the doctrine is contrary to the facts of history. Will they believe that black is white because the Council says so, investing it with a power to convert the false into true?"
Friedrich agreed with Veuillot to this extent, that history cannot be reversed by a conciliar decision. But Friedrich did not attempt to conceal his conviction that the Vatican Council was not Ecumenical. The regulations imposed upon it, from without, by the papal power, infringed its freedom of action, and kept it at the mercy of the majority. To his mind there was little interest or importance in the speeches delivered in the Council, since the initiative and the moving power lay elsewhere. He wrote dissertations, for the Cardinal Hohenlohe's instruction, contrasting the principles of the earlier Councils with the modern regulations. He affirmed that, according to ancient precedent, the right of introducing subjects lay with the Council itself, and not with the Papal See; that the Council and not the Pope possessed the power to define. But he saw that his own career as Professor of Theology was at an end, if the Ultramontanes should succeed. To continue in his former capacity would be in that case to incur the reproach: "You are a cowardly hypocrite, a liar; for you speak against what you know to be the witness of scientific history."
We owe to Friedrich the following letter, in which an Oriental Bishop who had ventured to sign a protest in Rome against the Infallibilist theory, makes an abject recantation:—
- ↑ From Friedrich's Tagebuch.
