infallible, and which are not. The prerogative must, of course, if true to-day be true of all the Christian centuries. Infallibility must be co-extensive with the existence of the Papacy. Consequently the papal utterances of all history must be sifted and classified in accordance with the Vatican Definition. It remains therefore for us to ascertain from Roman writers the outcome of their research, and to learn from them upon what precise occasions they consider that a Pope has complied with the conditions necessary to give his pronouncement this supreme unalterable authority.
I
The conditions required to make a papal utterance infallible are variously described. Bishop Fessler, who as Secretary of the Vatican Council, may be presumed, as being the Pope's selection, to have understood the papal mind, and whose position indisputably afforded him peculiar, if not unique, advantages, has laid it down that the tests of an infallible papal utterance are two. The first is that the subject-matter must be a doctrine of faith or morals; the second, that the Pope must express his intention, by virtue of his supreme teaching power, of declaring this particular doctrine a component part of the truth necessary to salvation revealed by God, and as such to be held by the whole Church. This was Secretary Fessler's declaration[1] almost immediately after the Decision, and published expressly to reassure and conciliate the alarmed and offended.
More usually in recent Roman theological works the conditions are somewhat more elaborately analysed as being four in number.
- ↑ Fessler, True and False Infallibility, p. 51.
